of his countrymen against the Moors. Thus he was styled The Lord
Champion--_El Cid Campeador_. The Cid died at the end of the eleventh
century, and "The Poem of the Cid" was composed before the end of the
twelfth. It was written after the year 1135, but before the year 1200.

The Cid is also the foremost hero of the ancient Spanish Ballads. The
ballads invent or record more incidents of his life than are to be
found in the Poem and the Chronicle; and of these Southey, in the
translation here reprinted, has made frequent and skilful use. Thus it
is from the Chronicle, the Poem, and the whole group of Ballads, as
collated by an English poet with a fine relish for Spanish literature
and a keen sense of the charm of old historical romance, that we get
the translation from the Spanish which Southey published at the age of
thirty-four, in the year 1808, as "The Chronicle of the Cid."

Robert Southey was born at Bristol on the 12th of August, 1774. He was
the son of an unprosperous linen-draper, and was cared for in his
childhood and youth by two of his mother's relations, a maiden aunt,
with whom he lived as a child, and an uncle, the Rev. Herbert Hill, who
assisted in providing for his education. Mr. Hill was Chaplain to the
British Factory at Lisbon, and had a well-grounded faith in Southey's
genius and character. He secured for his nephew some years of education
at Westminster School, and when Southey was expelled by an unwise
headmaster for a boyish jest, his uncle's faith in him held firm, and
he was sent on to Balliol College, Oxford. Those were days of wild hope
among the young. They felt all that was generous in the aspiration of
idealists who saw the golden cities of the future in storm-clouds of
revolution. Robert Southey at Oxford dreamed good dreams as a poetical
Republican. He joined himself with other young students--Coleridge
among them--who planned an experiment of their own in ideal life by the