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In his published Correspondence there is a letter describing this dinner which shows that I must have confided in him not a little as to my Bodleian reading, and the article on the "Poema del Cid" that I was writing. He confesses, however, that he did his best to draw me examining the English girl as a new specimen for his psychological collection.
The great poem in which his exploits were first celebrated, the famous "Poema del Cid," is thought to be the oldest, as it is one of the noblest in the Spanish language. Written probably not later than the year 1200, it is of about three thousand lines in length, and of such merit that its unknown author has been designated the "Homer of Spain."
The expression 'poema magis putandum quam comicorum poetarum, which has been applied to all the writings of Plato, is especially applicable to the Symposium. The power of love is represented in the Symposium as running through all nature and all being: at one end descending to animals and plants, and attaining to the highest vision of truth at the other.
Look, for instance, to Cicero at the outset of the Academics: "Tu ætatem patriæ, tu descriptiones temporum, tu sacrorum jura, tu sacerdotum munera, tu domesticam, tu bellicam disciplinam, tu sedem regionum et locorum, tu omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum nomina, genera officia, causas aperuiste: plurimumque poetis nostris omninoque latinis, et literis luminis attulisti, et verbis: atque ipse varium et elegans omni fere numero poema fecisti: philosophiamque multis locis inchoasti ad impellendum satis, ad edocendum parum."
My first published story, written when I was eighteen, had appeared in the Churchman's Magazine in 1870, and an article on the "Poema del Cid," the first-fruits of my Spanish browsings in the Bodleian, appeared in Macmillan early in 1872.
The merit of this discovery belongs to Francesco Zicari, whose paper, 'Sulla scoverta dell' originale italiano da cui Milton trasse il suo poema del paradiso perduto, is printed on pages 245 to 276 in the 1845 volume of the Naples 'Album scientifico- artistico-letterario' now lying before me.
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