Taylor, Edgar [Editor]; Austin, Sarah [Editor]: Lays of the minnesingers or German troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Illustr. by specimens of the contemporary lyric poetry of Provence and other parts of Europe ; With histor. and crit. notes, and engravings from the ms. of the minnesingers in the king's library at Paris, and from other sources (London, 1825)

38 CASTILLE.

be expected to have imbibed much of the manners
and perhaps the literature of their late masters. So,
in fact, it turned out: but the character of this early
Castilian literature is altogether different from that of
the Troubadours. Both Moors and Spaniards must
have considerably assimilated during so long a period
of intermixture :—for instance, the Arabs learned to
raise their women to a rank in society approaching
that which they enjoyed among the Christians, though
not to any great extent, for the allusions to the state
of females in society contained in Conde's compila-
tions from the Arabian documents are strictly Ori-
ental : and, on the other hand, their schools of ma-
thematics, physics and philosophy, were resorted to
by the studious of all religious denominations. But
it is perfectly absurd to attribute to them such an in-
fluence as is asserted over the poetic genius and social
relations of distant European countries, at a time
when the same principles were at work every where,
in giving the spring to civilization and the culture
of the mental faculties. M. Ginguene will not even
allow the smiling descriptions of the beauties of na-
ture, the joyous revelling in the genial influences of
spring, the delights of fields, of flowers, of brooks
and groves, to be natural ornaments of poetic imagi-
nation :—" tout cela est oriental," he observes.
Surely Gorres is more philosophic in his observation,
—that it was easier for our forefathers to search in