THE ASCENT OF BALLADS 121

the Middle Ages. Frontier ballads, splashed with intense colour,
represented the dramatic antithesis of Moors and Christians.
Morris ballads, chivalrous and sentimental, expressed the single-
ness of so many amorous hearts that the sound of

Listen, Zaide, as I advise you,
don't go strolling down my street

would have prevented any real Zaide from strolling in any of the
streets of Madrid. Once Juan de la Cueva had drawn on ballad
material, though not ballad style, for his first national drama, the
Siege of Zamora> the transfusion of ballads into drama proceeded
rapidly. Lope de Vega built up an entire dramatic history of Spain
from chronicles and ballads, interweaving ballad phrases into his
verses in such a way that the original cannot be discerned from the
new. He could do so the more readily because the best Castilian
ballads cut short the narrative, leaving only the dialogue. The
breathless dialogue between Ruy Velazquez and the avenging
Mudarra is more dramatic than the more diffuse treatment of the
same incident in Lope's Bastardo Mudarra. Calderon had not the
same appreciation of the epico-dramatic element in balladry; to
him ballads seemed to provide a simple conversational metre like
the roundel. He slips from one to the other as his topics change.
The conversational use of the 'romance' increased so much that
Leandro Fernandez de Moratin used it as the unique metre of his
Old Man and Girl, towards the end of the eighteenth centuiy. To
do so was a notable impoverishment of the resources of poetical
drama, which he abandoned in time; but it was eloquent evidence
of the vivacity of ballads.

The ballads of the younger Cid worked over materials taken from
the lost epic of the Mocedades. The Mocedades had spoken of the
feud between Diego Lainez and the father of Jimena. The boy
Ruy Diaz had taken on himself his father's quarrel, killed the
count, and harried the lands and washerwomen of the orphan
heiress, until she could see no way of protecting her patrimony
save by marrying her invincible enemy. She appealed to the king,
and the king commanded the marriage. Ruy Diaz, in his flaming
indignation, swore not to honour his wife until he had won five
pitched battles, which the straggling epos proceeds to recount. But
one of the ballads put a different complexion on the matter. Mind-
ful that Ruy Diaz had been brought up with the Castilian princes

4615 R