SPAIN, SPANISH JEWRY, PORTUGAL, IBERO-AMERICA 179

seems adventurous. The Italian name 're Inardi' resembles
'Bernaldino' or 'Bernardin' closely enough to guarantee the
identity in all important respects of the Spanish and North Italian
traditions.

More fugitive conventions are represented by the May theme
and the power of song. Gil Vicente gives us a short rhapsody,
which is the May song in a very simple form:

This is the May, the May is this,

this is the May and all aflower.

But the Spanish tradition, which appears in the ballad of the
Prisoner (i 14) and elsewhere, depends on the set descriptions of the
season which are to be found interspersed in French 'chansons de
geste', as well as in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales and in
Greece (Politis 235, &c.): that is, it proceeds by stages from the
warm season, through flowers, birds, animals, to human lovers.
This is not the manner of the medieval lyrical 'reverdies', but more
epic in tone. It serves as prologue in Spanish to a narrative about
some prisoner which has, fortunately, been truncated. The con-
trast is thus the more poignant:

Oh 'tis May, the month of May,

when the season's heat is high,

and the larks above are singing

and the nightingales reply,

and all lovers are a-running

on love's errands far and nigh;

all but me, afflicted, wretched,

that in prison-house do lie;

neither know I when day cometh,

nor when night is passing by,

were it not for one wee birdie,

singing when the dawn is nigh:

but an archer slew my birdie—

may he earn God's curse thereby! (114)

The other motif appears in Count Olinos (x, p. 72), which is a
fine ballad, but yet inferior to Count Arnaldos (153), which many
would reckon the flower of the 'romancero':

Fain would I have had the fortune
ocean's rolling waves upon,
fortune that befel Arnaldos
on the morning of St. John I