All the arguments, archæological and philological, erected and advanced by mere erudition will not convince me to the contrary. To some people antiquity is a living thing, a warm and glowing environment, a world with the paths and manners of which they are better acquainted than with the streets of every day. To others it is--a museum. I have no quarrel with the curators of that museum, and I enjoy reading their books--records of a land which few of them have visited. But when they insist upon controverting the evidence supplied by senses which they do not possess they become merely tiresome. Like art, archæology has also its inspirations, its higher vision. Alas that those who do not share it should attempt to justify their conclusions by lifeless logic alone! Therefore I shall say no more concerning the age of the ballads of Old Spain, but will only remark with Sancho that "they are too old to lie." I have clearly shown, too, that a number of them were based on passages in the chronicles and cantares, a circumstance which in itself vouches for their relative antiquity. With the later artificial imitations of Góngora and Lope de Vega, and others of similar stamp, we are not concerned here. After all, we can only take the ballads of Spain as we find them in the cancioneros. It is much too late in the day now to do anything else. Like the ballads of Scotland and Denmark, those of Spain have been collected and published for centuries, and in the pages of the cancioneros old and new, popular and literary, are mingled together in almost inextricable confusion. Let us glance, then, at the history of these cancioneros, these treasure-houses of a people's poetry, and attempt to realize their plan and scope as perhaps the best method by which to approach the subject of the Spanish ballad generally. Having done this, we can then discuss matters of origin with critics of insight and sympathy. The "Cancionero General" If we except the fragmentary collection of Juan Fernández de Constantina, the Cancionero General, or "Universal Song-book," as it might be translated, was originally brought together and published at the beginning of the sixteenth century by a certain Fernando del Castillo. The arrangement of the ballads it contains is neither chronological nor thoroughly systematic, although the productions of each author are kept distinct. Later editions of this work quickly multiplied, and as the collection extended the additions were always inserted at the end of the book. The collection consists for the most part of the ballads of authors of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, such as Tallante, Nicolas Núñez, Juan de Mena, Porticarrero, and the still earlier Marquis de Santillana.