Philippines and the Far East_, Chap. III.--TR.

[79] "The Willow."

[80] The capital of Laguna Province, not to be confused with the Santa
Cruz mentioned before, which is a populous and important district in
the city of Manila. Tanawan, Lipa, and Batangas are towns in Batangas
Province, the latter being its capital.--TR.

[81] "If on your return you are met with a smile, beware! for it
means that you have a secret enemy."--From the _Florante_, being the
advice given to the hero by his old teacher when he set out to return
to his home.

Francisco Baltazar was a Tagalog poet, native of the province of
Bulacan, born about 1788, and died in 1862. The greater part of his
life was spent in Manila,--in Tondo and in Pandakan, a quaint little
village on the south bank of the Pasig, now included in the city,
where he appears to have shared the fate largely of poets of other
lands, from suffering "the pangs of disprized love" and persecution
by the religious authorities, to seeing himself considered by the
people about him as a crack-brained dreamer. He was educated in the
Dominican school of San Juan de Letran, one of his teachers being Fray
Mariano Pilapil, about whose services to humanity there may be some
difference of opinion on the part of those who have ever resided in
Philippine towns, since he was the author of the "Passion Song" which
enlivens the Lenten evenings. This "Passion Song," however, seems to
have furnished the model for Baltazar's _Florante_, with the pupil
surpassing the master, for while it has the subject and characters
of a medieval European romance, the spirit and settings are entirely
Malay. It is written in the peculiar Tagalog verse, in the form of a
_corrido_ or metrical romance, and has been declared by Fray Toribio
Menguella, Rizal himself, and others familiar with Tagalog, to be
a work of no mean order, by far the finest and most characteristic
composition in that, the richest of the Malay dialects.--TR.

[82] Every one talks of the fiesta according to the way he fared at it.

[83] A Spanish prelate, notable for his determined opposition in
the Constituent Cortes of 1869 to the clause in the new Constitution
providing for religious liberty.--TR.

[84] "Camacho's wedding" is an episode in _Don Quixote_, wherein a
wealthy man named Camacho is cheated out of his bride after he has
prepared a magnificent wedding-feast.--TR.

[85] The full dress of the Filipino women, consisting of the _camis