tedly attached to his
prince, enthusiastically loved his country, and was unfalteringly loyal
to his faith; that he told the king honest, wholesome truths disguised
in verse; that he took no pains to conceal his scorn of those who, with
base servility, bowed to the ruling faith, and permitted its yoke to be
put upon their necks; that he felt himself the peer of the high in rank,
and the wealthy in the goods of this world; that he censured, with
incisive criticism, the vices of his Spanish and his Jewish
contemporaries--all of which is calculated to inspire us with admiration
for the Jewish troubadour, whose manliness enabled him to meet his
detractors boldly, as in the verses quoted above:

"Because beside a thorn it grows,
The rose is not less fair;
Though wine from gnarled branches flows,
'Tis sweet beyond compare.

A Jew true precepts doth apply,
Are they therefore less good?"

History does not tell us whether Pedro rewarded the Jewish troubadour as
the latter, if we may judge by the end of his poem, had expected. Our
accounts of his life are meagre; even his fellow-believers do not make
mention of him. We do know, however, that the poor poet's prayers for
his sovereign, his petitions for the weal and the glory of his country
were not granted. Pedro lost his life by violence, quarrels about the
succession and civil wars convulsed the land, and weakened the royal
power. Its decline marked the end of the peace and happiness of the Jew
on Castilian soil.

As times grew worse, and persecutions of the Jews in Christian Spain
became frequent, many forsook the faith of their fathers, to bask in the
sunshine of the Church, who treated proselytes with distinguished favor.
The example of the first Jewish troubadour did not find imitators. Among
the converts were many poets, notably Juan Alfonso de Baena, who, in the
fifteenth century, collected the oldest troubadour poetry, including his
own poems and satires, and the writings of the Jewish physician Don
Moses Zarzal, into a _cancionera general_. Like many apostates, he
sought to prove his devotion to the new faith by mocking at and reviling
his former brethren. The attacked were not slow to answer in kind, and
the Christian world of poets and bards joined the latter in deriding the
neophytes. Spanish literature was not the loser by these combats, whose
description belongs to general literary criticism. Lyric poetry, until
then dry, serious,