and he sings diligently of the misdeeds of clerics and usurers, of the incompetence of doctors, and of massacres of Jews. He seems to have followed the originals very closely, and evident traces of their language remain, French, English, and perhaps Provençal. The poems are often of considerable length, sometimes twenty or thirty verses, and as a rule the last line of each verse must rhyme with the refrain. The attention thus necessarily bestowed upon the rhymes sometimes mars the pathos of the subject, and the reader is reminded that he has to do with a skilful, eager, and industrious craftsman but not with a great original poet. In the remarkable _Ben vennas Mayo_ and in many of his other poems materialism and poetical ecstasy go hand in hand. Yet in several of the more beautiful legends the poet proves himself equal to his theme. Some of these legends are still famous, that of the Virgin taking the place of the nun (C. M. 55 and 94), of the knight and the pitcher (155), of the stone miraculously warded from the statue of the Virgin and Child (136 and 294), of the monk’s mystic ecstasy at the _lais_ of the bird in the convent garden (103). Others had probably an equal celebrity in the Middle Ages, as that of the captive miraculously brought from Africa and awaking free in Spain at dawn (325),[78] of the painter with whom the Devil was wroth for always painting him so ugly (74), or of the peasant whose vineyard alone was saved from the hail (161). Every tenth poem (the collection was intended originally to consist of one hundred) interrupts the narratives of miracles by a purely lyrical _cantiga de loor_, and some of these, written with the fervour with which the king always sang _as graças muy granadas_ of the _Madre de Deus Manuel_, are of great simplicity and beauty. The king had not always written thus, and of his profane poems we possess thirty[79] (since no one who has read the lively essay by Cesare de Lollis will doubt that C. V. 61-79 and C. C. B. 359-72 (= 467-78) were written by Alfonso X). The most important of these are historical, and invoke curses on false or recalcitrant knights, _non ven al mayo!_ C. V. 74 is a battle-scene description so swift and impetuous that we must go to the _Poema del Cid_ for a parallel. And indeed some of the old spirit peeps out from the _Cantigas de Santa Maria_, as when he prays to be delivered from false friends or praises the Virgin for giving his enemies ‘what they deserved’.