Constantinople. In some of the concluding romances of the series, indeed, happier fictions are introduced, and an attempt is made to vary with new incidents, and the splendour of eastern enchantments, the perpetual havoc which occurs in the preceding fables. But I am, perhaps, anticipating too much the reflections of the reader, and shall therefore, without farther delay, proceed to

AMADIS DE Gaul,1

which has generally been considered as one of the finest and most interesting romances of chivalry. Hence, perhaps, different nations have anxiously vindicated to themselves the credit of its origin. Lopez de Vega, in his Fortunas de Diano, attributes it to a Portuguese lady. On the authority of Nicholas Antonio, Warton has assigned the composition of Amadis de Gaul to Vasco Lobeira, a Portuguese officer, who died at Elvas in 1403, or, according to Sismondi, in 1325. This opinion has been also adopted by Mr. Southey, who has entered at considerable length into the reasons on which it is grounded. The original work he believes to be lost, but he conceives that Amadis was first written in the Portuguese language; and he argues that Lobeira was the author, from the concurrent testimony of almost all Portuguese writers, particularly of Gomes Eannes de Zurrara,3 in his chronicle of Don Pedro de Menezes, which appeared only half a century after the death of Lobeira. He also thinks the Portuguese origin of the romance is established from a sonnet by an uncertain poet, but a contemporary of Lobeira, praising him as the author, and from the circumstance that in the Spanish version by Montalvo, it is mentioned that the Infant Don Alphonso of Portugal had ordered some part of the story to be altered.

The French writers, on the other hand, and particularly the Comte de Tressan, in his preface to the Traduction libre d'Amadis de Gaule, have insisted that the work (or at least the three first of the four books it contains) was originally written in French, in the reign of Philip 1 Los quatro libros del Cavallero Amadis de Gaula. 2 De la Literature du midi de l'Europe.

3 Keeper of the Archives of Portugal in 1454.

:

Augustus, or one of his predecessors. His arguments rest on some vague assertions in old French manuscripts, that Amadis had been at one time extant, and on the similarity of the manners, and even incidents, described in Amadis, with those of Tristan and Lancelot, which are avowedly French he thinks it also improbable that while such hatred subsisted between the French and Spaniards, an author of the latter nation should have chosen a Gallic knight for his favourite hero; but this argument strikes only against a Spanish and not a Portuguese original. To the reasons of Tressan, however, may be added the testimony of one Portuguese poet, Cardoso, who says that Lobeira translated Amadis from the French by order of the Infant Don Pedro, son of Joan First;1 and also the

It is worthy of notice that towards the end of the third chapter, Lobeira writes:-"The author ceaseth to speak of this, and returneth to the child whom Gandales brought up." Ticknor, however, attaches little weight to the arguments against Lobeira's authorship. "The Portuguese original," he says, can no longer be found. At the end of the sixteenth century, we are assured it was extant in manuscript in the archives of the Dukes of Aveiro at Lisbon; and the same assertion is renewed on good authority about the year 1750. From this time, however, we lose all trace of it; and the most careful inquiries render it probable that this curious manuscript, about which there has been so much discussion, perished in the terrible earthquake and conflagration of 1755, when the palace occupied by the ducal family of Aveiro was destroyed with all its precious contents." The fact that the original manuscript of Amadis de Gaula "was in the Aveiro collection is stated by Ferreira, Poemas Lusitanos, where is the sonnet, No. 33. . in honour of Lobeira, which Southey, in his preface to his Amadis of Gaul, erroneously attributes to the Infante Antonio of Portugal, and thus would make it of consequence in the present discussion. Nic Antonio," a writer of by no means unimpeachable accuracy, "who leaves no doubt as to the authorship of the sonnet in question, refers to the same note in Ferreira to prove the deposit of the manuscript of the Amadis; so that the two constitute only one authority, and not two authorities as Southey supposes. (Bib. Vetus, lib. viii. cap. vii. sect. 291.) Barboso is more distinct. (Bib. Lusitana, tom. iii., p. 775.) He says, 'O original se conservava em casa dos Excellentissimos Duques de Aveiro.' But there is a careful summing up of the matter in Clemencin's notes to Don Quixote (tom. i., pp. 105, 106)." That the work, at least in the form in which it has been known since the middle of the fourteenth century, belongs to Spain seems to be shown almost to certainty by Dr. Braunfels in his Kritischer Versuch über den Roman Amadis von Gallien, Leip., 1876. See also E. Baret, De l'Amadis de Gaule et de son influence sur les mœurs et la littérature, etc. Paris, 1853.

assertion of D'Herberay, a translator of Amadis from the Spanish into French, about the middle of the 16th century, who declares that he had seen fragments of a MS. in the Picard language, which seemed to be the original of Amadis de Gaul:- "J'en ay trouvé encore quelque reste d'un viel livre, escrit a la main, en langage Picard, sur lesquel J'estime que les Espagnols ont fait leur traduction, non pas du tout suyvant le vrai original comme l'on pourra veoir par cestuy, car ils en ont obmis en aucuns endroits et augmenté aux autres." The testimony of Bernardo Tasso, author of the Amadigi, a poem taken from the romance, is also against a peninsular origin. To his evidence considerable weight is due, as he lived at a period of no great distance from the death of Lobeira, and from being engaged in a poem on the subject of Amadis, he would naturally be accurate and industrious in his researches. Now the Italian bard is decidedly of opinion, that the romance of Amadis has been taken from some ancient English or Breton history. "Non e dubbio," (says he in one of his letters to Girolamo Ruscelli,) "che lo scrittore di questa leggiadra e vaga invenzione l'ha in parte cavata da qualche istoria di Bertagna, e poi abbelitola e rendutala a quella vaghezza che il mondo cosi diletta;" (vol. ii., let. 166,) and again, "Gaula in lingua Inglese dalla quale e cavata quest' Istoria vuol dir Francia," (vol. ii. let. 93).

It also appears from various passages of the letters of B. Tasso, that as much doubt and misapprehension existed with regard to the country of the hero as concerning the original author of the romance. He says that the refabricator of the work from the British history thought that Gaul meant Wales, and that he had erroneously styled his hero Amadis of Gaul, per non avere inteso quel vocabulo Gaules, il qual nella lingua Inglese vuol dir Gallia." But Gaules signifying Gallia, or France, Tasso concludes that France was the country of Amadis; he therefore resolves to call his poem Amadigi di Francia, and expresses his confidence that the reasons he has assigned will be sufficient, a divellere questo invecchiato abuso dall opinion degli uomini." This general opinion, that Wales was the country of Amadis, was not an unnatural one, since Gaules and Gaula, in old English, was the name for Wales as well as

66

France:-"I say Gallia and Gaul-French and Welshsoul-curer and body-curer," exclaims the host in the Merry Wives of Windsor, (act. iii. scene i.) while addressing the French doctor and the Welsh parson. There are also several circumstances in the romance itself, which might have led to the mistake. Thus Amadis proceeding from Gaul to the court of the king of England, which was then held at Vindilisora (Windsor) sails to a goodly city in Great Britain, called Brestoya (Bristol,) a strange port to land at in crossing from France to England, but a very convenient harbour for one proceeding from South Wales to Windsor. On the whole, however, Tasso seems right in supposing that by Gaula the author of Amadis meant France; for we are told in the course of the work, that Perion, king of Gaul, and father of Amadis, summons to a council the bishops and lords of his kingdom, commanding them to bring the most celebrated clerks in their respective districts, and two members of the council were in consequence attended by Clerk Ungan of Picardy, and Alberto of Champagne.1

Though the Spaniards do not lay any claim to the original composition of this romance, nor to its hero as their countryman, the most ancient impression of it now extant is in their language, and was printed in 1526, at Seville. This work was compiled from detached Spanish fragments, which had appeared in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was subsequently revised and compared with the old manuscript fragments by Garcias Ordognez Montalvo, who at length published an amended edition in 1547, at Salamanca. From the prior edition of 1526, D'Her

1 Dr. Braunfels, however (op. cit. p. 164, etc.), adduces various points of internal evidence in favour of Wales.

2 Note from Clemencin's edition of "Don Quixote" (tom. i. p. 107), quoted by Ticknor. There is a difficulty about the original composition and construction of the Amadis of which I was not aware when the first edition of this History was published (1849), and which I will now (1858) explain as well as I can, chiefly from the notes of Gayangos to his translation (tom. i. pp. 520-522), and from his Discurso Preliminar to the fortieth volume of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, which contains the Amadis and Esplandian.

The difficulty in question arises, I think, in a great degree from the circumstance that the preface of Montalvo is given differently in the different early editions of the Amadis, and would lead to different in

beray formed his translation of the four books of Amadis, dedicated to Francis I., and printed 1540. To these he added other four books, containing the exploits of the descendants of Amadis, which were drawn from Spanish originals: the family history was subsequently carried to the twentyfourth book by translators who also wrought from Spanish originals, but sometimes added interpolations of their own; and the whole received the name of Amadis de Gaul, which was the title of all the peninsular prototypes. The first books, which relate peculiarly to the exploits of Amadis, were compressed by the Count de Tressan, in his free translation, into two volumes 12mo. His labour was entirely useless, as he has, in a great measure, changed the incidents of the romance, and hid the genuine manners and feelings of chivalry under the varnish of French seatiment. A late version by Mr. Southey is greatly preferable, as the events are there accurately related, and the manners faithfully observed.

ferences. In the one by Cromberger, 1520, which I have never seen, but which is cited by Gayangos, we are told of Montalvo, "que en su tiempo solo se conocian tres libros del Amadis, y quel el añadiò, trasladò y enmendò el quarto." The same fact of its being originally known in three books is set forth in some of the poems in Baena's "Cancionero," published 1851, and especially in a poem by Pedro Ferrus, who, perhaps, wrote as early as 1379, but lived a good deal later. From these and other circumstances of less consequence, Gayangos infers that there was current in Spain an Amadis in three books before Lobeira prepared his version of the story, which can, he thinks, hardly have been much before 1390, as the Infante Alfonso, who induced him to modify the story of Briolania, was not born till 1370. But who can have written

these three books, if they existed so early, or in what language they were written, is not even to be conjectured. Lobeira may have been their author as early as 1350 or 1370, and have altered the story of Briolania afterwards as late as 1390 to please the prince, as he says he did, and so the distinct and clear averment of Eannes de Zurara stand untouched. At any rate I do not see how we can get behind his testimony that Lobeira was the author, or behind Montalvo's testimony that the Amadis we now possesss was a translation made by him, with alterations and improvements.

An English translation by Thomas Paynel from the French was published in 1567 with the title, "The most excellent and pleasaunt Booke, entituled: The treasurie of Amadis of Fraunce: Conteyning eloquente orations, pythie Epistles, learned Letters, and fervent Complayntes, etc." An Italian translation appeared in 1546, and suggested the Amadigi di Francia of Bernardo Tasso. Du Verdier wrote a satire apon the Amadis, entitled the Chevalier Hypocondriaque.