168	ROMANCE BALLADS
'romancero'. There is no doubt that the ballads, as we have them,
are more fragmentary than once they were. The compiler of the
Cancionero de Amberes consistently gave his readers truncated ver-
sions, probably because the fashion of singing them at social meet-
ings had led to overcrowding in the programmes, overcrowding
much intensified by polyphonic settings. A fortunate discovery
among the Jews of Morocco has proved that the Count Arnaldos
poem was at least twice as long (and not a tithe as effective), and
the cycles of the Marquis of Mantua and Montesinos were probably
at one time single long ballads. In their present form Spanish
'romances' are the shortened and broken relics of older and longer
poems; but in most cases those poems were also ballads. This is
necessarily true of the historical pieces we have discussed in former
paragraphs: they never had any other form than that of 'romances',
apart from which they would not have worked their proper effects.
It is also true of those Carolingian ballads which summarize, but
do not reproduce, the plots of French epic poems. In the cycles
of Aimeri de Narbonne, Montesinos, and The Marquis of Mantua,
the narrative takes certain short cuts to a 'denouement', decimating
the lines and episodes of the epics. To derive the 'romances' from
epics by a process of fragmentation is therefore an explanation, if
valid, of no more than a small part of the whole 'romancero'.
Even in respect of that small part it has not been possible to
reach certainty. The greater number of epical ballads have to be
written off as 'ballads of minstrelsy'. Those concerning the Gothic
defeat (2-7) all fall within this class, and we further know that they
are based on no epic poem, but on the Cronica Sarracina of 1430.
This does not prevent them from boasting one of the most vivid of
4romances', that lament which Lockhart versified with such spirit as
Last night I was the King of Spain, this night no king am I.    (5)
In other cases we are not able to carry the argument into detail
because of the loss of the early poetical texts. That is true of the
ballads of Bernardo del Carpio (8-14), Ferndn Gonzalez (15-18),
Infantes de Lara (19-26), and Siege of Zamora (35-54). An ex-
ceptional argument can be urged in favour of the Lara group, viz.
that the prose of certain chronicles is a close approximation to
poetry, and that the ballads of the cycle bear all the marks of
authentic epical transmission. However that may be, the absence
of the epic originals prevents our reaching an absolute assurance.