Other verses of Manrique are to be found in the various _cancioneros_, or collections of Castilian poetry and song, that were gathered together in the course of the fifteenth century; but none deserve nor have reaped the same applause. In 1511, a _Cancionero General_ was printed at Valencia, that may be taken as typical of Queen Isabel’s reign and those of her father and brother. It declared its contents as “many and divers works of all, or of the most notable troubadours of Spain”; and it is indeed a varied collection of devotional hymns, moral discussions, love-songs, ballads, riddles, _villancicos_ or poems supposed to be of rustic origin, and _invenciones_ or rhymes concocted by the chivalry of Castile to explain the devices on their shields. In all there are over eleven hundred pieces; but few, especially of those that represent the close of the century, have the note of distinction. The true spirit of song is sometimes there, rising with sudden power and conviction in scattered lines or stanzas; but for the most part imprisoned in a maze of forms and unrealities that leave our emotions and our imaginations cold. The butterfly is still enwrapped in the chrysalis. Spanish prose, during the reign of the Catholic Sovereigns, was in the same transitional stage as poetry. The promise of good things was working to its fulfilment, but the harvest would be reaped in another age. In the national chronicles, the oldest form of prose literature, this change may be seen at work. The narratives of the reign of Henry IV., covering the earlier years of Isabel’s life, are mere annals, sometimes more or less impartial as in the case of “Enriquez del Castillo,” or else frankly partisan, like the pages that bear the name of Alonso de Palencia.[12] Their value lies either in their picturesque style, or in the descriptions of scenes, at which the authors themselves were present. Footnote 12: This chronicle is probably a rough extract of part of Mosen Diego de Valera’s _Memorial de Hazanas_,—taken in its turn from Palencia’s _Las Decadas de Las Cosas de mi Tiempo_, which was originally written in Latin. The same may be said of Andres Bernaldez’s _Historia de Los Reyes Católicos_, one of the most valuable authorities for the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel. Bernaldez, parish priest of Los Palacios near Seville, was no ambitious historian; and it is not his lack of bias nor his well-balanced judgment that has won him the thanks of posterity, but rather the simplicity with which he recounts events that he himself had witnessed or that had touched him nearly. We are grateful that he had the kindly thought of memorizing his impressions of the war in Granada, and of recalling the deeds of the hero Columbus, who once stopped in his house; but the work of sifting the grain of his information from the chaff is left to his readers.