What there was of really Spanish in their verse must be allowed to have been mainly the impoverishment of the original models. The Spaniard has always been recalcitrant to the shackles imposed by complicated and artful forms of verse, and there is a natural tendency in him to drift at all times to his native trochaic assonants of eight syllables. His language, admirable when properly handled for prose, wants the variety of melody required for poetry. Impatience of the difficulties of metre is another name for the want of a due sense of the beauty of form. Indeed it is not by its form that Spanish literature has been distinguished. Given, then, a people who had very little faculty for delicate verse, and a language which wanted both the wealth of the Italian accent and the flexibility of the French, and it is easy to see what was likely to be the end of the Provençal and Petrarchian influence in the Court school. Its poetry, never more than an echo, sank into mechanical verse-making--mostly in eight-syllabled couplets, relieved by a broken line of four. The inborn preference of the Spaniard for loose metres gradually gained the upper hand. No doubt fine verses may be picked out from the bulk of the writings of the troubadour school of Castile. The _rhythmus de contemptu mundi_, known as the _coplas de Manrique_, which has been made known to English readers by Mr Longfellow, is even noble in its rigid gravity. But the merit lies not in the melody of the verse, which soon becomes monotonous. It is in this, that the _coplas_ give us perhaps the finest expression of one side of the Spaniard. They are full of what he himself calls in his own untranslatable word _el desengaño_--that is to say, the melancholy recognition of the hollowness of man’s life, and “the frailty of all things here”--not in puling self-pity, but in manly and pious resignation to fate and necessity. [SN: _The_ Cancioneros.]