Few of the ballad systems of Europe are better worthy of study than that of Spain. But in this place we are considering it merely from the point of view of its bearings upon Romance. That it has a close affinity with the Romantic literature of the Peninsula is evident from the name given to these poems by the Spaniards, who call them romanceros. [18] Some of them are, indeed, romances or cantares de gesta in little, and in fact they deal with all the great subjects sung of in the cantares or prosed upon in the chronicles, such as the Cid, Bernaldo de Carpio, Count Alarcos, and so forth. But they seem to have little in common with the later romances proper, such as Amadis, Palmerin, or Felixmarte, for the good reason that by the time these were in fashion the ballad had become the sole property of the common people. As the Marquis de Santillana (1398-1458), himself a poet of note, remarks in a letter famous for the light it throws on the condition of Spanish literature in his day: "There are contemptible poets who, without order, rule, or rhythm, make those songs and romances in which vulgar folk and menials take delight." So might Lovelace or Drummond of Hawthornden have written of our own balladeers. The ballads thus relegated to the peasantry and lower classes, those of the upper classes who found time for reading were accordingly thrown back upon the chronicles and the few cantares de gesta which had been reduced to writing. But on the destruction of the Moorish states in Spain the increase in wealth and leisure among the upper classes, and the introduction of printing, aroused a demand for books which would provide amusement. A great spirit of invention was abroad. At first it resuscitated the Romantic matter lying embedded and almost fossilized in the chronicles. It is, indeed, but a step from some of these to the romances proper. But Spain hungrily craved novelty, and the eyes of romance-makers were turned once more to France, whose fictional wealth began to be exploited by Spanish writers about the beginning of the fifteenth century. The Heyday of Romance Perhaps the first literary notice that we possess of the romance proper in Spain is that by Ayala, Chancellor of Castile (d. 1407), who, in his Rimado de Palacio, deplores the time he has wasted in reading such "lying stuff" as Amadis de Gaul. He might have been much worse occupied, but, be that as it may, in his dictum we scarcely have a forecast of the manner in which this especial type of romance was to seize so mightily upon the Castilian imagination, which, instead of being content with mere servile copying from French models, was to re-endow them with a spirit and genius peculiarly Spanish. Perhaps in no other European country did the seed of Romance find a soil so fitting for its germination and fruition, and certainly nowhere did it blossom and burgeon in such an almost tropical luxuriance of fruit and flower.