Down they go in deadly wrestle, Down upon the earth they go. Fierce King Pedro has the vantage, Stout Don Henry falls below.
Marking then the fatal crisis, Up the page of Henry ran, By the waist he caught Don Pedro, Aiding thus the fallen man.
They had better have let the ballad alone, those two at Abbotsford. It does not seem to me "a very striking ballad," as Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly observes, but in its Castilian dress it is sufficiently dramatic and exciting.
Los fieros cuerpos revueltos Entre los rubustos brazos Está el cruel rey Don Pedro Y Don Enrique, su hermano.
No son abrazos de amor Los que los dos se están dando; Que el uno tiene una daga, Y otro un puñal acerado.
So run the first two verses, which I leave the reader to translate for himself, lest further damage be done them.
The proclamation of Don Henry takes up the story where the preceding ballad left it off. In the translation of this, it seems to me, Lockhart has been much more successful than his great father-in-law proved himself in that of its companion ballad. I do not think it possible, however, to render adequately by an English pen the dignified rhythm of the Castilian in which this romancero is dressed. But the second verse,
So dark and sullen is the glare of Pedro's lifeless eyes, Still half he fears what slumbers there to vengeance may arise. So stands the brother, on his brow the mark of blood is seen, Yet had he not been Pedro's Cain, his Cain had Pedro been,
is really fine, expressive, and ascends a whole scale of terrible thought and realization. Are these awful eyes dead? Can the threat they hold be imaginary? My hands are wet with brother's blood, but it is only by virtue of a slender chance that his are not imbrued with mine. The verse is horribly eloquent of the death-cold atmosphere of the moment which follows murder--simple, appalling, desperately tragic. The mad grief of the slain King's paramour is drawn with a touch almost as successful.
In her hot cheek the blood mounts high, as she stands gazing down, Now on proud Henry's royal stole, his robe and golden crown, And now upon the trampled cloak that hides not from her view The slaughtered Pedro's marble brow, and lips of livid hue.
We may pass by "The Lord of Butrayo" and "The King of Arragon" and come to the ballad of "The Moor Reduan," a piece based on the siege of Granada, last stronghold of the Moors, and the first of those in which Lockhart deals with the romanceros fronterizos, or romances of the frontier, which, as we have before remarked, may have been influenced by Moorish ideas, or may even represent borrowings or données of a kind more or less direct. In his critique of this romancero Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly says: "Lockhart is, of course, not to blame for translating the ballad precisely as he found it in the text before him. Any translator would be bound to do the same to-day if he attempted a new rendering of the poem; but he would doubtless think it advisable to state in a note the result of the critical analysis which had scarcely been begun when Lockhart wrote. It now seems fairly certain that Pérez de Hita ran two romanceros into one, and that the verses from the fourth stanza onward in Lockhart,