The early Portuguese _Cancioneiros_ contain many references to this cycle, and the _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_ opens with five celebrated songs,[118] imitations of Breton _lais_, with rubrics explaining their subjects, and mentioning King Arthur and Tristan, Iseult, Cornwall, Maraot of Ireland, and Lancelot. Whether they were incorporated in the _Cancioneiro_ from a Portuguese _Tristam_ earlier than the Spanish version (1343?), or, as is more probable, directly from the Old-French _Historia Tristani_, their presence here is a sufficient witness to the Portuguese fondness for such themes. It was but natural that a Celtic people living by the sea, delighting in vague legends and in foreign novelties, should have felt drawn towards these misty tales of love and wandering adventure, which carried them west as far as Cornwall and Ireland, and also East, through the search for the Holy Grail. It was natural that they should undergo their influence earlier and more strongly than their more direct and more national neighbours the Castilians, whose clear, definite descriptions in the twelfth-century _Poema del Cid_ would send those legends drifting back to the dim regions of their birth. (Even to-day connexion with and sympathy for Ireland is far commoner in Galicia than in any other part of Spain.) Unhappily, most of the early Portuguese versions of the Breton legends have been lost. King Duarte in his library possessed _Merlim_, _O Livro de Tristam_, and _O Livro de Galaaz_. The probability that these were written in Portuguese, not in Spanish, is increased by the survival of _A Historia dos Cavalleiros da Mesa Redonda e da Demanda do Santo Graall_, as yet only partially published from the manuscript (2594) in the Vienna _Hofbibliothek_. It was written probably in the fourteenth century, perhaps at the end of the thirteenth, although the Vienna manuscript is more recent and belongs to the fifteenth century, in which the work was referred to by the poet Rodriguez de la Cámara.[119] It is a Portuguese version of the story of the Holy Grail, and, although not a continuous translation, was evidently written with the French original (doubtfully ascribed to Robert de Boron,[120] author of a different work on the same subject) constantly in view. Traces of French remain in its prose.[121] This was clearly part of a larger work,[122] perhaps of a whole cycle of works dealing with the search for the Holy Grail. The only others that we have in print are the _Estorea de Vespeseano_ and the _Livro de Josep ab Arimatia_, the manuscript of which was discovered in the nineteenth century in the Torre do Tombo. This, in the same way as the _Demanda do Santo Graall_, is a later (16th c.) copy of a thirteenth-fourteenth-century Portuguese translation or adaptation from the French, and retains in its language signs of French origin. The incunable _Estorea de Vespeseano_ (Lixboa, 1496) is a work in twenty-nine short chapters, which only incidentally[123] refers