214 ON THE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE 



relij^ious traditions of the Tagala race, their genealo- 

 o-ies, and the feats of their gods and heroes, are care- 

 full} preserved in historical poems and songs, which, 

 in their youth, they carefully commit to rnemory, 

 and are accustomed to recite during lahour and long 

 yoyages, but particularly at their festivals and so- 

 lemn lamentations for the dead. These original me- 

 morials of the race, the missionaries have, with pious 

 care, attempted to extirpate, and have employed 

 themselves sedulously in composing religious tracts, 

 both in prose and verse, in the Tagala, with the 

 hope of supplanting the remains of national and pagan 

 antiquity. Many psalms and hymns, and even some 

 of the Greek dramas composed by Dionysius Areo- 

 PAGiTA, have in this manner been translated into 

 the TagMa language. Among this brood of Tagala 

 poets, the names of Fra. Antonio de S. Gre- 

 GORio, of Fra. Alonso de S. Ana, and of 

 Fra. Pablo Clain, the translator of Kempis, into 

 Tagala, are celebrated, but the most illustrious of 

 them all, says the reverend father Caspar de S. Au- 

 GusTiN, is Fra. Pedro de Herrera, the very Ho- 

 race of the Tagala language, as appears by his book 

 of " Postrimerias." With the original Tagala poetry 

 I am unacquainted, and I believe no specimen of it 

 has been hitherto published. S. Augustin, in his 

 grammar, treats, indeed, of Tagala poetry, but he 

 piously confines his examples to the works of his 

 ghostly brethren. He observes, that the Tagala 

 verse, is regulated by the rhythm of the syllables, 

 aud the similarity of the vowels in the close. This 

 similaritvof the terminating; vowels does not amount 

 to regular rhyme, tor the consonants may be totally 

 different, though the vowels are similar, as in the 

 Spanish rhymes termed Asonantes. Thus laglag and 

 taltal silt and cahuy, silip and bukkir, however imper- 

 fect as rhymes, are all that is required in the termi- 



