NATIONAL POETRY. 



Guillaume Cretin and Jean d'Auton, both of whom were chroniclers of King 

 Louis XII., went even further in this direction, and Jean Lemaire (born at 

 Beiges, in Hainault), to whom French prosody probably owes some beneficial 

 reforms, had great difficulty in avoiding these bad examples. 



Poetry was not so flourishing in other parts of Europe. In Spain, where 

 the works of the Provencal troubadours were still imitated, this was the era of 

 gallant poetry, one of the favourite forms for a poem being the rcdondilla, in 

 which the writer exhausted every resource of the language to describe his 

 sentiments. These poems were in especial favour at the court of John II., 

 King of Castile, and amongst the most gifted composers of them were the 



Fig. 345. Extract from the "Cancionero" of Juan Alfonso de Baena. Original Manuscript 

 (Fifteenth Century). In the National Library, Paris. 



Marquis de Villena and Juan de Mena (Fig. 345). Part of these sentimental 

 and lackadaisical poems, to which no less than a hundred and forty authors 

 contributed, were collected in 1516 into a book entitled "Cancionero General." 

 Portugal, like Spain, sought her models from among the troubadours, whom 

 it was striven to imitate, and even to translate. But these timid efforts ended 

 in the invention of the pastoral romance, which represented the love-passages 

 of the shepherds and shepherdesses. This artificial style, which, though 

 sometimes pleasing, was more often flat and tiresome, was destined to take its 

 place in the literature of all lands, and so great is the force of habit to retain 



