Some of the poems of the early _Cancioneiros_, as we have seen, have an historical character, but they are all written from a personal point of view. Portuguese history, with its heroic achievements such as the conquest of Algarve, seems to have begun just too late to be the subject of great anonymous epics, or rather the temperament of the Portuguese people eschewed them. Of five poems, long believed to be the earliest examples of Portuguese verse but no longer accepted by any sane critic as genuine, only one belongs to epic poetry. This _Poema da Cava_ or _da Perda de Espanha_ was an infant prodigy indeed, since it was supposed to have been written (in _oitavas_) in the eighth century. With a discretion passing that of Horace it kept itself from the world not for nine but nine hundred years, and was first published in Leitão de Andrada’s _Miscellanea_ (1629)[140]: _O rouço da Cava imprio de tal sanha_, &c. Of the four other spurious poems, two[141] were alleged to be love letters of Egas Moniz Coelho, a cousin of the celebrated Egas Moniz Coelho of the twelfth century; another, published by Bernardo de Brito,[142] _Tinherabos nam tinherabos_, has a real charm as gibberish. Fascination, of a different kind, attaches also to the fifth: No figueiral figueiredo, no figueiral entrei: Tres niñas encontrara, tres niñas encontrei, for if this poem is not genuine, and the fact that it was first published by Brito[143] at once lays it open to grave suspicion, it is nevertheless undoubtedly based on popular tradition of a yearly tribute of maidens to the Moors such as the Greeks paid to the Minotaur, and must be the echo of some Algarvian song. Its simple repetitions have a haunting rhythm, but they are perhaps a little too emphatic. The impression is that its author had been struck by the repetitions in songs heard on the lips of the people, perhaps crooned to him in his infancy (cf. _Miscellanea_, p. 25: _sendo eu muito menino_), and worked them up in this poem. One early epic poem Portugal undoubtedly possessed, the _Poema da Batalha do Salado_, by AFONSO GIRALDEZ, who himself probably took part in the battle (1340). The subject of the poem is the same as that of the Spanish _Poema de Alfonso Onceno_, but whether its treatment was similar we cannot say, as only forty lines of the Galician-Portuguese poem survive. Since the authorship of the Spanish poem is doubtful and its rhymes run more naturally in Galician than in Spanish, the theory has arisen, among others, that Rodrigo Yannez, whose name perhaps denotes a connexion with Galicia, merely translated the poem of Afonso Giraldez. But against this it is argued that Yannez or Eanez was a Galician or wrote Galician lyrics (there are several poets of that name in the _Cancioneiro da Vaticana_), and when called upon to compose an epic--for Spain a late epic--chose Castilian, the traditional language of such poetry, and in executing his design found that his enthusiasm