n this first glimpse of the cathedral and dinner,
but it must have been on our return to our hotel, that the little
interpreter who had met us at the station, and had been intermittently
constituting himself our protector ever since, convinced us that we
ought to visit the City Hall, and see the outside of the marble tomb
containing the bones of the Cid and his wife. Such as the bones were
we found they were not to be seen themselves, and I do not know that I
should have been the happier for their inspection. In fact, I have no
great opinion of the Cid as an historical character or a poetic fiction.
His epic, or his long ballad, formed no part of my young study in
Spanish, and when four or five years ago a friend gave me a copy of it,
beautifully printed in black letter, with the prayer that I should read
it sometime within the twelvemonth, I found the time far too short. As
a matter of fact I have never read the poem to this day, though. I have
often tried, and I doubt if its author ever intended it to be read. He
intended it rather to be recited in stirring episodes, with spaces for
refreshing slumber in the connecting narrative. As for the Cid in real
life under his proper name of Rodrigo de Vivas, though he made his
king publicly swear that he had had no part in the murder of his royal
brother, and though he was the stoutest and bravest knight in Castile,
I cannot find it altogether admirable in him that when his king banished
him he should resolve to fight thereafter for any master who paid
him best. That appears to me the part of a road-agent rather than a
reformer, and it seems to me no amend for his service under Moorish
princes that he should make war against them on his personal behalf
or afterward under his own ungrateful king. He is friends now with the
Arabian King of Saragossa, and now he defeats the Aragonese under the
Castilian sovereign, and again he sends an insulting message by the
Moslems to the Christian Count of Barcelona, whom he takes prisoner
with his followers, but releases without ransom after a contemptuous
audience. Is it well, I ask, that he helps one Moor against another,
always for what there is in it, and when he takes Valencia from the
infidels, keeps none of his promises to them, but having tortured the
governor to make him give up his treasure, buries him to his waist and
then burns him alive? After that, to be sure, he enjoys his declining
years by making forays in the neighboring coun