known, and, like French, _plus commune à toutes_ _gens_.[73] He had no delicate ear for its music and made such poor use of its pliancy that it often becomes as hard as the hardest Castilian in his hands. His songs of miracles offer a striking contrast to contemporary Portuguese lyrics in the same language. Their jingles are only possible as a _descort_ in the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_. At the same time he would be influenced in his choice of language by his knowledge of Galicia as the traditional home of the lyric, of the encouraging patronage extended to Galician poets by his son-in-law Afonso III, of the Santiago school of poets, and of the promising future before the Galician language in the hands of the conquering Portuguese. _Multas et perpulchras composuit cantilenas_, says Gil de Zamora, and likens him to David. But when we remember the prodigious services rendered by Alfonso X to Castilian prose, the first question that arises is whether he was indeed the author of the 450 poems in Galician[74] that we possess under his name. Of these poems 426, or, cancelling repetitions, 420, are of a religious character, written, with one or two exceptions, in honour of the Virgin: _Cantigas de Santa Maria_. Many of these poems themselves provide an answer to the question: they record his illnesses and enterprises and his _trobar_ in such a way that they could only have been written by himself: he is the _entendedor_ of Santa Maria (C. M. 130), he exhorts other _trobadores_ to sing her praises (C. M. 260), he himself is resolved to sing of no other _dona_ (C. M. 10: _dou ao demo os otros amores_); and his attractive and ingenuous pride in these poems accords ill with an alien authorship. When he lay sick at Vitoria and was like to die it was only when the _Livro das Cantigas_ was placed on his body that he recovered (C. M. 209), and he directed that they should be preserved in the church in which he was buried. There is little reason to doubt that he was the author, in a strictly limited sense, of the majority of the poems, although not of all. Various phrases seem to imply a double method. C. M. 219 says: ‘I will have that miracle placed among the others’; C. M. 295: ‘I ordered it to be written.’ On the other hand, C. M. 47 is ‘a fair miracle of which I made my song’; C. M. 84 ‘a great miracle of which I made a song’; of 106 ‘I know well that I will make a goodly song’; of 64 ‘I made verses and tune’; for 188 ‘I made a good tune and verses because it caught my fancy’; for 307 ‘according to the words I made the tune’; of 347 ‘I made a new song with a tune that was my own and not another’s’. The inference seems to be that, the personal poems and the _loas_ apart, if a miracle especially attracted the king he took it in hand; otherwise he might leave it to one of the _joglares_, and he would perhaps revise it and be its author to the extent that the Portuguese _jograes_ were authors of the early _cossantes_. We know that he had at his Court a