The _Gesta Ruderici Campidocti_ survives in a unique manuscript which was stolen during the last century from the Monastery of St. Isidore at León, was bought in Lisbon by Gotthold Heyne two years before he died on the Berlin barricades of 1848, and is now, after many wanderings, in the Academy of History at Madrid. The _Poema del Cid_ also reaches us in a unique manuscript, the work of a certain Per Abbat who in 1307 wrote out the text from a pre-existing copy; this manuscript is not known to have passed through any such adventures as the _Gesta_, but it has evidently had some narrow escapes from destruction: the beginning of the _Poema del Cid_ is missing, a page is wanting after verse 2337, and another page is wanting after verse 3307. Had Per Abbat not taken the trouble to write out the _Poema_, or had his manuscript disappeared before October 1596 (when it was transcribed by Juan Ruiz de Ulibarri), the epic on the Cid would be as unknown to us as the epics on Roderick, Bernardo del Carpio, and the rest. Per Abbat seems to have followed an unfaithful copy in an uncritical fashion, but the defects in the existing text cannot all be laid at his door. There are passages in the _Poema del Cid_ which are almost universally regarded as interpolations, and for these Per Abbat is not likely to be responsible. It is more probable that he continued in the bad way of his predecessors, who apparently took it upon themselves to abridge the poem. This desire for greater brevity is answerable for transpositions and corruptions which are the despair of editors and translators; but, mutilated as it is, the _Poema del Cid_ is a primitive masterpiece, the merits of which have been increasingly recognised since the text was first published by Tomás Antonio Sánchez in 1779.
The interest in the literary monuments of the Middle Ages was not then what it is now. We are talking of a period more than half a century before any French _chanson de geste_ was printed, and the taste for mediævalism had still to be created. The Spanish poet, Quintana, who died only fifty years ago, and was a lad when the _Poema del Cid_ was published, could see nothing to admire in it; and yet Quintana’s taste in literature was far more catholic than that of most of his contemporaries. Still the _Poema_ slowly made its way in the world of letters. One illustration will suffice to show that it was closely studied within a few years of its appearance in print. John Hookham Frere, the British Minister at Madrid, read the _Poema del Cid_ on the recommendation of the Marqués de la Romana, who had praised it as ‘the most animated and highly poetical as well as the most ancient and curious poem in the language.’ In verse 2348 of the _Poema_:—