SPAIN, SPANISH JEWRY, PORTUGAL, IBERO-AMERICA 155

of the later 'cossantes', which have been too readily accepted as
typical of this art, the parallelism was made more rigorous, and
progress (such as there might be in such simple expressions of
feeling) was made by linking the lines. These poems, then, gave
expression to the domestic occasions of courtship and separation,
and were for the most part, though running under the names of
male troubadours and minstrels, regarded as 'women's songs'.
Their form suggests the round dance guided by a precentor.
They raise the question of feminine priority in the lyric for
Portugal as the 'chori feminarum rusticarum' do for France and
the 'zenske pesme5 for Yugoslavia. In their feminine and domes-
tic setting, their delicate parallelism and exquisite candour, the
'cossantes* resemble the 'dainos' of Lithuania, which we shall
have occasion to consider later. During the fifteenth century
and early sixteenth, they gave way to another popular form, the
quatrain or 'quadra5, just as the lyrical 'daina' of Lithuania gave
way in Latvia to the epigrammatic 'daina', more often than not a
quatrain. At the present day improvisation among the peasants
of Portugal and, to some extent, of Galicia uses the mould of the
'quadra'.

In Castile, on the other hand, there flourished a narrative lyric
called the Villancico'. Its early history is hard to unravel, but it is
at least plausible to believe that the pattern was known to the
Spanish-speaking subjects of the caliphs and sultans of Andalusia.
In the fifteenth century the form is exemplified by the 'senranilla'
of the- Marquis of Santillana. The theme is announced in an
opening quatrain or phrase:

No prettier grows a
dear maid on the Border
than she, the cow-warder
of La Finojosa.

The poet then gives, in a sequence of verses ending with this phrase
or part of it, a narrative setting for his emotion. He states where
he met the maiden, what he was doing, and how the encounter
proceeded. These pieces correspond to the 'pastourelles' of France,
but they are excluded from the Castilian 'romancero' by the differ-
ence of form and by their lyrical manner.

The Spanish ballad style is thus singularly uniform. To be a
ballad the poem must be in one sort of verse—the octosyllable
with alternate assonance—and in one style—the objective narra-