As to the ballads, what has been said about those in Portuguese must be repeated at somewhat greater length. There is no doubt at all that these ballads (which are well known even to English readers by the masterly paraphrases of Lockhart) are among the finest of their kind. They rank with, and perhaps above, the best of the Scottish poems of the same class. But we have practically, it would seem, no earlier authority for them than the great _Cancioneros_ of the sixteenth century. It is, of course, said that the _Cronica General_ (see _post_), which is three centuries earlier, was in part compiled from these ballads. But, in the first place, we do not know that this was the fact, or that the ballads were not compiled from the Chronicles, or from traditions which the Chronicles embodied. And in the second place, if the Chronicles were compiled from ballads, we do not know that these ballads, as pieces of finished literature and apart from their subjects, were anything at all like the ballads that we possess. This last consideration--an uncomfortable one, but one which the critic is bound to urge--at once disposes of, or reduces to a minimum, the value of the much-vaunted testimony of a Latin poem, said to date before the middle of the eleventh century, that "Roderic, called _Mio Cid_," was sung about. No doubt he was; and no doubt, as the expression _Mio Cid_ is not a translation from the Arabic, but a quite evidently genuine vernacularity, he was sung of in those terms. But the testimony leaves us as much in doubt as ever about the age of the _existing_ Cid ballads. And if this be the case about the Cid ballads, the subject of which did not die till hard upon the opening of the twelfth century itself, or about those concerning the Infantes of Lara, how much more must it be so with those that deal with such subjects as Bernardo del Carpio and the Charlemagne invasion, three hundred years earlier, when it is tolerably certain that there was nothing at all resembling what we now call Spanish? It seems sometimes to be thought that the antiquity of the subject of a ballad comports in some strange fashion the antiquity of the ballad itself; than which nothing can be much more disputable. Indeed the very metre of the ballads themselves--which, though simple, is by no means of a very primitive character, and represents the "rubbing down" of popular dialect and unscholarly prosody for a long time against the regular structure of Latin--disproves the extreme earliness of the poems in anything like their present form. The comparatively uncouth, though not lawless metres of early Teutonic poetry are in themselves warrants of their antiquity: the regularity, not strait-laced but unmistakable, of the Spanish ballads is at least a strong suggestion that they are not very early. [Sidenote: _The_ Poema del Cid.]