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　　THE POEM OF THE CID.

　　Rodrigo Ruy Diaz, El Cid Campeador, was born near Burgos, in Spain, about 1040. The name Cid was given him by the Moors, and means lord. Campeador means champion.

　　Ruy Diaz was the trusty lord of Sancho, King of Castile, who at his death divided his kingdom among his children. He then espoused the cause of the eldest son, Sancho, and assisted him in wresting their portion of the kingdom from his brothers Garcia and Alfonso. Sancho having been treacherously slain while besieging his sister Urraca's town of Zamora, the Cid attached himself to Alfonso, humiliating him, however, by making him and his chief lords swear that they had had no hand in Sancho's death. For this, Alfonso revenged himself by exiling the Cid on the slightest pretexts, recalling him only when his services were needed in the defence of the country.

　　This much, and the Cid's victories over the Moors, his occupation of Valencia, and his army's departure therefrom in 1102, led by his corpse seated on horseback, "clothed in his habit as he lived", are historical facts.

　　A great mass of romances, among them the story of his slaying Count Don Gomez because he had insulted his father, Diego Laynez; of Don Gomez's daughter Ximena wooing and wedding him; of his assisting the leper and having his future success foretold by him, and of his embalmed body sitting many years in the cathedral at Toledo, are related in the "Chronicle of the Cid" and the "Ballads."

　　The Poem of the Cid narrates only a portion of his career, and "if it had been named," says Ormsby, "would have been called 'The Triumph of the Cid.'"

　　The Poem of the Cid was written about 1200 A. D. Its authorship is unknown.

　　It contains three thousand seven hundred and forty-five lines, and is divided into two cantares. The versification is careless; when rhyme hampered the poet he dropped it, and used instead the assonant rhyme.

　　The Poem of the Cid is of peculiar interest because it belongs to the very dawn of our modern literature, and because its hero was evidently a real personage, a portion of whose history was recorded in this epic not long after the events took place. The Cid is one of the most simple and natural of the epic heroes; he has all a man's weaknesses, and it is difficult to repress a smile at the perfectly natural manner in which, while he slaughters enough Moors to secure himself a place in the heavenly kingdom, he takes good care to lay up gold for the enjoyment of life on earth. The poem is told with the greatest simplicity, naturalness, and directness, as well as with much poetic fire. National Epics