hold himself free, that he may carry out the
law of his land to the letter; that he may
return from his travels at the appointed time
"a wiser and a better man;" that he may
show proofs of his acquired skill in his trade,
and thereupon claim the master's right and
position. He is then free to marry, and is
looked upon as an "eligible party." But how
seldom does all this come to pass, may the
thousands who swarm in London and Paris,
may the German colonies which dot the
American States sufficiently tell. Many
linger in large cities till they feel that to
return to the little native village, and its old,
poor, plodding ways, would be little better
than burial alive; and some return, wasted
with foreign vice and purchased adversity,
premature old men, to die upon the threshold
of their early homes.

One more question— what are their amusements?
It would be a long story to tell, but
certainly home-reading is not a prominent
enjoyment among them. German governments ,
as a rule, take care that the people's
amusements shall not be interfered with.
The workmen throng in dance-houses,
beer-cellars, cafés, and theatres, which are all
liveliest and most attractive on a Sunday, and
as they are tolerably cheap, they are
generally a successful lure from deep thinking or
study. Besides, the German workman has
no home. If he stay there at all in holiday
hours, it is to draw, or model, or sing romances
to the strumming of his guitar.

SPANISH ROMANCE.

ANY one who has made the acquaintance
of the Spanish hero, the Cid, in the
full-bottomed wig and stuffed out metaphors
furnished to him by Corneille, will find it
difficult to form any idea of the real character
of an individual so disguised. We have little
to help us in this endeavour in Spanish
records, for national pride and popular
ignorance have so bedizened him with
impossible perfections, that he has become a
mythical personage altogether, and his
exploits look as apocryphal as those of Amadis
de Gaul. Songs and ballads give us little
more enlightenment than tragedians or
chroniclers. Like our own Robin Hood, he is
overlaid by his celebrators, and nothing of
him remains but what was originally invented
by bards and minstrels. Was there a Robin
Hood? The common stories will tell you he
was an Earl of Huntingdon in the reign of
Henry the Second, who escaped from the
struggles and ambitions of courts, and betook
himself, as a bold outlaw, to the merry greenwood .
Here, surrounded by his free
companions, he dispensed wild justice, punishing
the oppressors of the poor, and easing fat
churchmen of their ill-got gains. He became
a political impersonation, and represented
Reform, both in Church and State.

Was there a Cid? He was a certain Don
Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, and flourished in the
eleventh century, in the reign of the First
Ferdinand of Castile. By tremendous bodily
strength, unflinching courage, and some
knowledge of military tactics, he gained great
victories over the Moors. He strengthened his
King's throne by unfailing loyalty; and he
also, like the English freebooter, became a
personification, and represented chivalrous
honour and Christian obedience. "True as the
Cid," "stainless as the Cid," and a hundred
other phrases expressive of the people's
admiration, became part of the language; and
there are few Spaniards who would not resent
as bitterly an attack on the virtues of their
favourite hero, as if to doubt his perfections
were a personal insult to his countrymen.

Out of the mass of ballads celebrating his
adventures little could be made. The leaves
had overgrown the tree. Scene was huddled
upon scene without any order or regularity.
Fights with Moorish chiefs; philosophical
disquisitions with the King; his reconciliation
with Ximene after he had slain her
father— these, and fifty other incidents, lay in
a confused heap without any regard to
arrangement or chronology. The Spaniards
were too idle or too ignorant to set their
house in order, even although in this instance
it was the temple of fame. They were in
equal want of a Livy and a Macaulay. There
was no one to compose a good consecutive
history out of the ballads; nor any one to
embody, in regular historical ballads, the
events which tradition had handed down.
Both these achievements were reserved for a
foreign people. Our worthy friends, the
Germans, in the midst of their beer and
smoke, have a lively feeling for the romantic,
and a profound reverence for the systematic.
So Müller, the historian of Switzerland, wrote
a life of Ruy Diaz de Bivar, el Cid,
Campeador; and Herder, the philosopher and
poet, put all the legends into shape, and
made him the hero almost of an epic poem.
Retaining as much as possible the flow of the
original verse, he gave his countrymen the
results of the cancioneros, and an excellent
idea, at the same time, of the nature of those
lays of the Spanish minstrels. With a faint
hope of accomplishing the same result, we
have devoted this paper to a translation of
some of the most characteristic passages in
Herder's work. There is a fine musical roll
in the rhythm of the original, which leaves
no room to regret the want of rhyme.

The proud Don Gormaz, the father of the
beautiful Ximene, as in the French play,
has inflicted the indelible disgrace of a blow
on the aged father of the Cid, Don Diego.
His family are yet ignorant of his shame, and
the old man is in despair.

I.

    Deep in grief sat Don Diego,
    Ne'er lived man so sunk in sorrow;
    Night and day he brooded ever
        On the insult he endured,—