SPAIN, SPANISH JEWRY, PORTUGAL, IBERO-AMERICA 175

affections which constitute the stuff of the Lancelot story,
Cervantes particularly cherished the opening lines:

Ne'er was knight so nobly tended,
nobly served by gentle dames,
as was Lancelot the goodly
when from Brittany he came.
Matrons stood and waited on him,
damsels waited on his jade,
and that Lady Centenarian
skilfully his liquor strained,
and Queen Guenevere the lovely
by her side the hero laid, (148)

The Carolingian ballads are far more numerous and elaborate.
They cannot be made into a closed group, because of the Castilian
custom of attracting into this cycle all romantic narratives. Some of
them should thus be termed semi-Carolingian, rather than Carolin-
gian, and even so there remain others uncertainly attached. The fact
is that almost all the adventure ballads current in Castile were of
foreign origin. The genius of the land was to form veracious
historical statements, or at least such as could lay reasonable claim
to historicity. Mere fabling was at a discount. But in France there
was a lively imagination at work to produce effects which, even if
they had some historical sanction for Frenchmen, were mere novels
to Spaniards. The Castilians made no effective discrimination
between the pseudo-historical adventures of Charlemagne's peers
and those of anonymous heroes. The poets knew France as a land
with one city (Paris) and one emperor (Charlemagne). It was also
a land where proper names commonly ended in -os, as Oliveros,
Montesinos, Guarinos, Gaiferos, Calainos, Carlos: a curious sur-
vival of the Old French nominatives in -s. Now it was from French
originals and intermediaries that they knew all, or almost all, they
learned about the balladry of the rest of Europe. Signs of the
importation are that the action of such ballads is often said to be in
France (though Aragon may be mentioned as a land lying between
Castile and France and probably actually traversed by these ballads
In their extension to Castile), that proper names are of a French
sort, that there may be mention of an emperor, and that there is
some tendency to conform to the French rule about the unequal
cadences of hemistichs in a long line. While it is not impossible
for an adventure to be wholly castilianized, romantic adventures