northern Europe were the
natural haunts of mystery and unearthly terrors. The old Teutonic
forest, the Schwarzwald and the Hartz, were peopled by the popular
imagination with were-wolves, spectre huntsmen, wood spirits, and all
those nameless creatures which Tieck has revived in his "Maehrchen" and
Hauptmann in the Rautendelein of his "Versunkene Glocke." The treeless
plateaus of Spain, and her stony, denuded sierras, all bare and bright
under the hot southern sky, offered no more shelter to such beings of the
mind than they did to the genial life of Robin Hood and his merry men
"all under the greenwood tree." And this mention of the bold archer of
Sherwood recalls one other difference--the last that need here be touched
upon--between the ballads of Spain and of England. Both constitute a
body of popular poetry, _i.e._, of folk poetry. They recount the doings
of the upper classes, princes, nobles, knights, and ladies, as seen from
the angle of observation of humble minstrels of low degree. But the
people count for much more in the English poems. The Spanish are more
aristocratic, more public, less domestic, and many of them composed, it
is thought, by lordly makers. This is perhaps, in part, a difference in
national character; and, in part, a difference in the conditions under
which the social institutions of the two countries were evolved.

Spain collected her ballads early in numerous songbooks--_cancioneros_,
_romanceros_--the first of which, the "Cancionero" of 1510, is "the
oldest collection of popular poetry, properly so-called, that is to be
found in any European literature." [9] But modern Spain had gone through
her classic period, like England and Germany. She had submitted to the
critical canons of Boileau, and was in leading-strings to France till the
end of the eighteenth century. Spain, too, had her romantic movement,
and incidentally her ballad revival, but it came later than in England
and Germany, later even than in France. Historians of Spanish literature
inform us that the earliest entry of French romanticism into Spain took
place in Martinez de la Rosa's two dramas, "The Conspiracy of Venice"
(1834) and "Aben-Humeya," first written in French and played at Paris in
1830; and that the representation of Duke de Rivas' play, "Don Alvaro"
(1835), was "an event in the history of the modern Spanish drama
corresponding to the production of 'Hernani' at the Theatre Francais" in
1830.[10] Both of t