ABSTRACT
The Spanish word romance, which in earlier times signified the vernacular as opposed to Latin, has come to be restricted in meaning to short heroic poems or ballads of a particular form and to the metre in which they are composed. The system of rhyme common to all the ballads is called asonante; it existed in the old French chansons till displaced by full rhyme in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some of the earliest extant ballads are apparently rhymed versions of the chronicles, whilst some of the chronicles are prose versions of the ballads. In other instances both have probably been drawn from some common source. This form of composition is very easy in Spanish, and about two thousand ballads of widely different dates go to form the great collection known as the Romancero General. The ballads were at that time ceasing to be really popular, and were becoming, greatly to their loss, the property of literary men.
