Quite as characteristic of the period is a small selection of ballads printed for the first time in 1564. It was made by some person of distinction, who sent it to Alonso de Fuentes, with a request that he would furnish it with all needful explanations in prose. This he did; but the original collector died before it was published. Of the forty ballads of which it consists, ten are on subjects from the Bible; ten from Roman history; ten from other portions of ancient history; and the remainder from the history of Spain, coming down to the fall of Granada. We are not told where they were obtained, and none of them has much value;--the great merit of the whole, in the eyes of those who were concerned in their publication, consisting, no doubt, in the wearisome historical and moral commentary by which each is followed. Fuentes, however, who intimates that the task was hardly worthy of his position, may have had a better taste in such things than the person who employed him; for, in a prefatory epistle, he gives us, of his own accord, the following ballad, evidently very old, if not very spirited, which he attributes to Alfonso the Wise. But it is no otherwise the work of that monarch than that all but the last stanzas are taken from the remarkable letter he wrote on the disastrous position of his affairs in 1280, when, by the rebellion of his son and the desertion of the higher ecclesiastics of his kingdom, he was reduced, in his old age, to misery and despair,--a letter already cited, and more poetical than the ballad founded on it. I left my land, I left my home, To serve my God against his foes; Nor deemed, that, in so short a space, My fortunes could in ruin close. For two short months were hardly sped, And April was but gone, and May, When Castile’s towers and Castile’s towns From my fair realm were rent away. And they that should have counselled peace Between the father and his son, My bishops and my lordly priests, Forgetting what they should have done,-- Not by contrivance deep and dark, Not silent, like the secret thief, But trumpet-tongued, rebellion raised, And filled my house with guilt and grief. Then, since my blood denies my cause, And since my friends desert and flee,-- Since they are gone, who should have stood Between the guilty blow and me,-- To thee I bend, my Saviour Lord, To thee, the Virgin Mother, bow, For your support and gracious help Pouring my daily, nightly vow: For your compassion now is all My child’s rebellious power hath left To soothe the piercing, piercing woes That leave me here of hope bereft. And since before his cruel might My friends have all in terror fled, Do thou, Almighty Father, thou, Protect my unprotected head.