Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/140

cxxii CXXl INTRODUCTION. Brief glory of tUe Li- mousin. long after the genuine race of the troubadours had passed away, the Provencal or Limousin verse was carried to its highest excellence by the poets of Valencia.^^ It would be presumptuous for any one, who has not made the romance dialects his particu- lar study, to attempt a discriminating criticism of these compositions, so much of the merit of which necessarily consists in the almost impalpable beau- ties of style and expression. The Spaniards, how- ever, applaud, in the verses of Ausias March, the same musical combinations of sound, and the same tone of moral melancholy, which pervade the pro- ductions of Petrarch.^^ In prose too, they have (to borrow the words of Andres) their Boccacio in Martorell; whose fiction of "Tirante el Blanco " is honored by the commendation of the curate in Don Quixote, as "the best book in the world of the kind, since the knights-errant in it eat, drink, sleep, and die quietly in their beds, like other folk, and very unlike most heroes of romance." The productions of these, and some other of their distinguished con- temporaries, obtained a general circulation very ear- ly by means of the recently invented art of printing, and subsequently passed into repeated editions.^* 93 The Valencian, " the sweetest and most graceful of the Limousin dialects," says Mayans y Siscar, Origeues, toiu. i. p. 58. fl* Nicolas Antonio, Bibliotheca, Hispana Vetus, (Matriti, 1788,) torn. ii. p. 146. — Andres, Lette- ratura, torn. iv. P- 87. 95 Cervantes, Don Quixote, (ed. de Pellicer, Madrid, 1787,) tonri. i. p. C)-3. — Mendcz, Typographia Espafiola, (Madrid, 17'JG,) pp. 72 -75. — Andres, Letteratura, ubi supra. Pellicer seems to take Martorell's word in good earnest, that his book is only a version from the Castilian. The names of some of the most noted troubadours are collected by Velazquez, Poesia Caslellana, (pp. 20 - 24. — Capmany, Mem. de l^arcclona, tom. ii. Apend. no. 5.) Some extracts and pertinent criti- cisms on their productions may be