patriotism, and she was never so little as when the printing-presses of Burgos and Valladolid and Saragossa flooded her cities with a mercenary and undistinguished fiction, prompted by commercial greed, and joyfully received by a public avid for the drug of sensation. CHAPTER V: THE PALMERIN ROMANCES Let Palmerin of England be preserved as a singular relic of antiquity. Cervantes It would seem to have been a foible with the early critics of Spanish romance to seek to discover a Portuguese origin for practically all of its manifestations. They appear to have argued from the analogy of Amadis that all romantic effort hailed from the Lusitanian kingdom, yet they are never weary of descanting upon the Provençal and Moorish influences which moulded Spanish romance! It is precisely as if one said: "Yes, the Arthurian story displays every sign of Norman-French influence, but all the same, it was first cast into literary form in Wales. England? Oh, England merely accepted it, that's all." The Palmerin series ran almost side by side with Amadis in a chronological sense, and tradition ascribed its first book to an anonymous lady of Augustobriga. But there is reason to believe, from a passage in Primaleón, one of its sections, that it was the work of Francisco Vasquez de Ciudad Rodrigo. No early Portuguese version is known, and the Spanish edition of the first romance of the series, Palmerin de Oliva, printed at Seville in 1525, was certainly not the earliest impression of that work. The English translation, by Anthony Munday, was published in black letter in 1588. Palmerin de Oliva No sooner did Palmerin de Oliva appear than it scored a success only second to that of Amadis, its resemblance to which can scarcely be called fortuitous, and, as in the case of that romance, translations and continuations were multiplied with surprising rapidity. The commencement of Palmerin de Oliva carries us once more to the enchanted shores of the Golden Horn. Reymicio, the Emperor of Constantinople, had a daughter named Griana, whom he had resolved to give in marriage to Tarisius, son of the King of Hungary, and nephew to the Empress. But Griana had given her heart to Florendos of Macedon, to whom she had a son. Dreading the wrath of her father, she permitted an attendant to carry the infant to a deserted spot, where it was found by a peasant, who took it to his cottage, and brought it up as his own son, calling the child Palmerin de Oliva, because he had been found on a hill which was covered with a luxuriant growth of palm and olive trees.