SPAIN, SPANISH JEWRY, PORTUGAL, IBERO-AMERICA 161

In the later series (84-96) the background is the War of Granada,
but the heroes disport themselves in a merely chivalresque fashion.
There is an element of the conventional in the later pieces, with
idealized Moors and polished Christians. It has fallen also under
the influence of a singular genius, Gines Perez de Hita, whose
romanticized history of that war shines through Washington
Irving's prose for English readers. He is our leading source for
several such pieces, and he was not incapable of writing a quite
plausible 'traditional' ballad of his own invention. It is rather in
the earlier group that we find the classic conditions of balladry.
These are the songs of small communities, intensely preoccupied
with their own immediate dangers and successes. Local names—
Sayavedra, Bishop Gonzalo, Fajardo, &c.—are those that effectively
matter. The nation is taken for granted along with the division
of religions, but these are not tales of a national drive. As in other
lands, the national question is reduced to its simplest form: the irre-
ducible antithesis of Moor and Christian. Kings and great nobles
appear in the ballads only when they happen to be on the spot;
otherwise royalty is a part of the remoter background. The ballad
public was completely homogeneous, but it was no plebs. It had its
leaders, and the poets sang of and for these leaders and the gentlemen
who lent their swords. A Swedish ballad says of similar raiders:

Them shall men praise
in courtly lays

mid knights and dames.

Such courtliness is to be found in the Castilian frontier ballads:
instinctive good-breeding in the songs of persons well-bred.

An average ballad of the series—not the dashing Verdant River
(96 a), which Percy found in Perez de Hita and made famous in
Europe—concerns the fall of Antequera in 1410 (74). It begins:

Fled the Moor from Antequera
three long hours before the day,
carried in his hands his letters
praying earnestly for aid;
blood in place of ink was written—
not that ink was wanting there.
Moor that bore the hasty missive,
doubly sixty years of age;
white his flowing beard as silver,
shaven pate that shone like day,

4615 -o-