The development of Romance in Spain, its evolution and the phases through which it passed, has not, as a theme, met with that painstaking treatment at the hands of English writers on Spanish literature that might have been expected at this late day, when the literary specialist has to search diligently into the remotest corners of the earth if he seek new treasures to assay. Its several phases are rather hinted at than definitely laid down, not because of the poverty or dubiety of the evidential material so much as through the laxity and want of thoroughness which characterize most Britannic efforts at epochal fixation or attempts to elucidate the connexion between successive literary phases. I can scarcely hope to succeed in a task which other and better equipped authorities have neglected, perhaps for sound reasons. But I had rather fail in an attempt to reduce the details of the evolution of Spanish Romance to orderly sequence than place before the reader an array of unrelated facts and isolated tags of evidence which, however interesting, present no definite picture, permit of no reasonable deduction, and are usually accompanied by a theoretical peradventure or so by way of dubious enlightenment. If we regard the literary map of Europe from the eleventh to the thirteenth century we behold the light shining from two quarters--Jewish-Arabic Spain and France. With the first we have, at the moment, no concern. Its literature was at the time alien and inimical to Christian Spain, which, as we shall see later, did not regard anything Saracen with complacence until its sword crossed no longer with the scimitar. But in France Castile had an illustrious exemplar, whose lessons it construed in its own peculiar manner--a manner dictated both by national pride and political necessity. With the influence of Southern France we have already dealt. At the era alluded to, Northern France, the country of the langue d'oïl, although in a measure disturbed by unrest, was yet in a much better case to produce great literature than Castile, whose constant vendetta with the Moslem left her best minds only a margin of leisure for the production of pure literature--a margin, however, of which the fullest advantage was taken. The rise of a caste of itinerary poets in France supplied the popular demand for story-telling, and the trouvères of the twelfth century recognized in the glorious era of Charlemagne a fitting and abundant source for heroic fiction such as would appeal to medieval audiences. The poems, or rather epics, which they based upon the history of the Carlovingian period were known as chansons de gestes, 'songs of the deeds' of the great Frankish emperor and his invincible paladins, or, to the trouvères themselves, as matière de France, as the Arthurian tales were designated matière de Bretagne, and those based upon classical history matière de Rome.