ABSTRACT
For a few chapters, before it has time to earn its reputation as a vast compendium of chivalresque nonsense, the Espejo de Principes y Caval/eros, or, to use its English title, The Mirror of Knighthood, is not without interest. It begins with the fashionable pretence of recording the worthy deeds of the mighty Emperor Trebacio, and the valiant acts of the knights of his time, &C according as Artemidoro the Grecian hath left them written in the great volumes of his Chronicle l ." At twenty-five years of age Trebacio, a descendant of Achilles, was reigning in Epirus, where his ancestors had been kings before him. When, about this time, the Emperor of Greece died without issue, Trebacio was elected in his stead, for besides being of great fame, he was "of conditions very noble, pleasant, loving to aU, liberal, courteous, sufferable, pitiful, and above all very
1 In the quotations the quaint language of the Elizabethan translation is here generally followed.
