Pantaleon, Villamediana, Coronel, and the rest of his imitators, whose ballads are generally worse than any thing else they wrote, because, from the very simplicity and truth required by the proper nature of such compositions, they less tolerate an appearance of affectation. [50] Lopez Maldonado was a friend of Cervantes, and his Cancionero (Madrid, 1586, 4to) was among the books in Don Quixote’s library. There is a beautiful ballad by him, (f. 35,) beginning,-- Ojos llenos de beldad, Apartad de vos la ira, Y no pagueis con mentira A los que os tratan verdad. The other authors referred to in the text have been before noticed. [51] Some of Góngora’s romantic ballads, like his “Angelica and Medoro,” and some of his burlesque ballads, are good; but the best are the simplest. There is a beautiful one, giving a discussion between a little boy and girl, how they will dress up and spend a holiday. Cervantes, who was Góngora’s contemporary, tells us that he composed vast numbers which are now lost; and, from his own opinion of them, we have no reason to regret their fate. Lope’s, on the contrary, which he preserved with a care for his own reputation that was not at all characteristic of Cervantes, are still numerous and often excellent; especially those that relate to himself and his loves, some of the best of which seem to have been produced at Valencia and Lisbon.[52] At the same time and later, good ballads were written by Quevedo, who descended even to the style of the rogues in their composition; by Bernarda de Fereira, a nun in the romantic convent of Buzaco, in Portugal; by Rebolledo, the diplomatist; and perhaps, though with some hesitation, we should add, by Solís, the historian.[53] Indeed, wherever we turn, in the Spanish poetry of this period, we find ballads in all their varieties of tone and character,--often by authors otherwise little known, like Alarcon, who, in the end of the sixteenth century, wrote excellent devout ballads,[54] or Diego de la Chica, who is remembered only for a single satirical one, preserved by Espinosa in the beginning of the seventeenth;[55]--but we always find them in the works of those poets of note who desired to stand well with the mass of their countrymen. [52] Cervantes speaks of his “numberless ballads” in his “Viage al Parnaso.” Those of Lope de Vega soon came into the popular ballad-books, if, indeed, some of the best of them were not, as I suspect, originally written for the “Flor de Romances” of Villalta, printed at Valencia in 1593, 18mo. [53] Solís, “Poesías Sagradas y Humanas,” 1692, 1732, etc. [54] “Vergel de Plantas Divinas, por Arcangel de Alarcon,” 1594.