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Title: History of Spanish Literature, vol. 3 (of 3).

Author: George Ticknor

Release Date: February 3, 2018 [EBook #56490]

Language: English

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SECOND PERIOD.
(Continued.)

THIRD PERIOD.

The Literature that existed in Spain between the Accession of the Bourbon Family and the Invasion of Bonaparte; or from the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century to the Early Part of the Nineteenth.

Satirical poetry, whether in the form of regular satires, or in the more familiar guise of epistles, has never enjoyed a wide success in Spain. Its spirit, indeed, was known there from the times of the Archpriest of Hita and Rodrigo Cota, both of whom seem to have been thoroughly imbued with it. Torres Naharro, too, in the early part of the sixteenth century, and Silvestre and Castillejo a little later, still sustained it, and wrote satires in the short national verse, with much of the earlier freedom, and all the bitterness, that originally accompanied it.

But after Mendoza and Boscan, in the middle of that[p. 4] century, had sent poetical epistles to one another written in the manner of Horace, though in the Italian terza rima, the fashion was changed. A rich, strong invective, such as Castillejo dared to use when he wrote the “Satire on Women,” which was often reprinted and greatly relished, was almost entirely laid aside; and a more cultivated and philosophical tone, suited to the stately times of Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second, took its place. Montemayor, it is true, and Padilla, with a few wits of less note, wrote in both manners; but Cantorál with little talent, Gregorio Murillo with a good deal, and Rey de Artieda in a familiar style that was more winning than either, took the new direction so decidedly, that, from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the change may be considered as substantially settled.[1]

Barahona de Soto was among the earliest that wrote in this new form, which was a union of the Roman with the Italian. We have four of his satires, composed after he had served in the Morisco wars; the first and the last of which, assailing all bad poets, show plainly the school to which he belonged and the direction he wished to follow. But his efforts, though seriously made, did not raise him above an untolerated mediocrity.[2]

A single satire of Jauregui, addressed to Lydia, as if she might have been the Lydia of Horace, is better.[3][p. 5] But in the particular style and manner of the philosophical Horatian satire, none succeeded so well as the two Argensolas. Their discussions are, it is true, sometimes too grave and too long; but they give us spirited pictures of the manners of their times. The sketch of a profligate lady of fashion, for instance, in the one to Flora, by Lupercio, is excellent, and so are long passages in two others against a court life, by Bartolomé. All three, however, are too much protracted, and the last contains a poor repetition of the fable of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse, in which, as almost everywhere else, its author’s relations to Horace are apparent.[4]

Quevedo, on the other hand, followed Juvenal, whose hard, unsparing temper was better suited to his own tastes, and to a disposition embittered by cruel persecutions. But Quevedo is often free and indecorous, as well as harsh, and offends that sensibility to virtue which a satirist ought carefully to cultivate. It should, however, be remembered in his favor, that, though living under the despotism of the Philips, and crushed by it, no Spanish poet stands before him in the spirit of an independent and vigorous satire. Góngora approaches him on some occasions, but Góngora rarely dealt with grave subjects, and confined his satire almost entirely to burlesque ballads and sonnets, which he wrote in the fervor of his youth. At no period of his life, and certainly not after he went to court, would he have hazarded a satirical epistle like the one on[p. 6] the decay of Castilian spirit and the corruption of Castilian manners, which Quevedo had the courage to send to the Count Duke Olivares, when he was at the height of his influence.[5]

The greatest contemporaries of both of them hardly turned their thoughts in this direction; for as to Cervantes, his “Journey to Parnassus” is quite too good-natured an imitation of Caporali to be classed among satires, even if its form permitted it to be placed there; and as to Lope de Vega, though some of his sonnets and other shorter poems are full of spirit and severity, especially those that pass under the name of Burguillos, still his whole course, and the popular favor that followed it, naturally prevented him from seeking occasions to do or say any thing ungracious.

Nor did the state of society at this period favor the advancement, or even the continuance, of any such spirit. The epistles of Espinel and Arguijo are, therefore, absolutely grave and solemn; and those of Rioja, Salcedo, Ulloa, and Melo are not only grave, but are almost entirely destitute of poetical merit, except one by the first of them, addressed to Fabio, which, if neither gay nor witty, is an admirably wise moral rebuke of the folly and irksomeness of depending on royal favor. Borja is more free, as became his high station, and speaks out more plainly; but the best of his epistles—the one against a court life—is not so good as the youthful tercetos on the same subject by Góngora, nor equal to his own jesting address to his collected poems. Rebolledo, his only successor of any note at the time, is moral, but tiresome; and Solís, like the few that followed him, is too dull to be remembered. In[p. 7]deed, if Villegas in his old age, when, perhaps, he had been soured by disappointment, had not written three satires which he did not venture to publish, we should have nothing worth notice as we approach the disheartening close of this long period.[6]

Nearly all the didactic satires and nearly all the satirical epistles of the best age of Spanish literature are Horatian in their tone, and written in the Italian terza rima. In general, their spirit is light, though philosophical,—sometimes it is courtly,—and, taken together, they have less poetical force and a less decided coloring than we might claim from the class to which they belong. But they are frequently graceful and agreeable, and some of them will be oftener read, for the mere pleasure they bestow, than many in other languages which are distinguished for greater wit and severity.

The truth, however, is, that wit and severity of this kind and in this form were never heartily encouraged in Spain. The nation itself has always been too grave and dignified to ask or endure the censure they imply; and if such a character as the Spanish has its ridiculous side, it must be approached by any thing rather than personal satire. Books like the romances of chivalry may, indeed, be assailed with effect, as they were by Cervantes; men in classes may be caricatured, as they are in the Spanish picaresque novels and in the old drama; and bad poetry may be ridiculed, as it was by half the poets who did not write it, and by some who did. But the characters of individuals, and especially[p. 8] of those in high station and of much notoriety, are protected, under such circumstances, by all the social influences that can be brought to their defence, and cannot safely be assailed.

Such, at least, was the case in Spain. Poetical satire came there to be looked upon with distrust, so that it was thought to be hardly in good taste, or according to the conventions of good society, to indulge in its composition.[7] And if, with all this, we remember the anxious nature of the political tyranny which long ruled the country, and the noiseless, sleepless vigilance of the Inquisition,—both of which are apparent in the certificates and licenses that usher in whatever succeeded in finding its way through the press,—we shall have no difficulty in accounting for the fact, that poetical satire never had a vigorous and healthy existence in Spain, and that, after the latter part of the seventeenth century, it almost entirely disappeared till better times revived it.

Elegies, though from their subjects little connected with satire, are yet, by their measure and manner, connected with it in Spanish poetry; for both are generally written in the Italian terza rima, and both are often thrown into the form of epistles.[8] Garcilasso could[p. 9] write elegies in their true spirit; but the second that passes under that name in his works is merely a familiar epistle to a friend. So is the first by Figueroa, which is followed by others in a tone more appropriate to their titles. But all are in the Italian verse and manner, and two of them in the Italian language. The eleven “Lamentations,” as he calls them, of Silvestre, are elegiac epistles to his lady-love, written in the old Castilian measures, and not without the old Castilian poetical spirit. Cantorál fails; nor can the Argensolas and Borja be said to have succeeded, though they wrote in different manners, some of which were scarcely elegiac. Herrera is too lyric—too lofty, perhaps, from the very nature of his genius—to write good elegies; but some of those on his love, and one in which he mourns over the passions that survive the decay of his youth, have certainly both beauty and tenderness.

Rioja, on the contrary, seems to have been of the true temperament, and to have written elegies from instinct, though he called them Silvas; while Quevedo, if he were the author of the poems that pass under the name of the Bachiller de la Torre, must have done violence to his genius in the composition of ten short pieces, which he calls Endechas, in Adonian verse, but which read much like imitations of some of the gentler among the old ballads. If to these we add the thirteen elegies of Villegas, nearly all of which are epistles, and one or two of them light and amusing epistles, we shall have what is most worthy of notice in this small division of Spanish poetry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that has not been already considered. From the whole, we should naturally infer that the Spanish temperament was little fitted to the subdued, simple, and gentle tone of the proper elegy; a conclusion that is[p. 10] undoubtedly true, notwithstanding the examples of Garcilasso and Rioja, the best and most elegiac portions of whose poetry do not even bear its name.[9]

Pastoral poetry in Spain is directly connected with elegiac, through the eclogues of Garcilasso, which unite the attributes of both. To his school, indeed, including Boscan and Mendoza, we trace the earliest successful specimens of the more formal Spanish pastoral, with the characteristics still recognized. But its origin is much earlier. The climate and condition of the Peninsula, which from a very remote period had favored the shepherd’s life and his pursuits, facilitated, no doubt, if they did not occasion, the first introduction into Spanish poetry of a pastoral tone, whose echoes are heard far back among the old ballads. But the Italian forms of pastoral verse were naturalized as soon as they were introduced. Figueroa, Cantorál, Montemayor, and Saa de Miranda—the last two of whom were Portuguese, and all of whom visited Italy and lived there—contributed their efforts to those of Garcilasso and Boscan, by writing Spanish eclogues in the Italian manner. All had a good degree of success, but none so much as Saa de Miranda, who was born in 1495, and died in 1558, and who, from the promptings of his own genius, renounced the profession of the law, to which he was bred, and the favor of the court, where his prospects were high, in order to devote himself to poetry.

[p. 11]He was the first of the Portuguese who wrote in the forms introduced by Boscan and Garcilasso, and none, perhaps, since his time has appeared in them with more grace and power,—certainly none in the particular form of eclogues. His pastorals, however, are not all in the new manner. On the contrary, some of them are in the ancient short verse, and seem to have been written before he was acquainted with the change that had just been effected in Spanish poetry. But all of them are in one spirit, and are marked by a simplicity that well becomes the class of compositions to which they belong, though it may rarely be found in them. This is true, both when he writes his beautiful pastoral story of “The Mondego,” which is in the manner of Garcilasso, and contains an account of himself addressed to the king; and when he writes his seventh eclogue, which is in the forms of Enzina and Vicente, and seems to have been acted amidst the rejoicings of the noble family of Pereira, after one of their number had returned from military service against the Turks.

But a love of the country, of country scenery and country occupations, pervades nearly every thing Saa de Miranda wrote. The very animals seem to be treated by him with more naturalness and familiarity than they are elsewhere; and throughout the whole of his poetry, there is an ease and amenity that show it comes from the heart. Why he wrote so much in Spanish, it is not now easy to tell. Perhaps he thought the language more poetical than his native Portuguese, or perhaps he had merely personal reasons for his preference. But whatever may have been the cause, six out of his eight eclogues are composed in natural, flowing Castilian; and the result of the whole is, that, while, on all accounts, he is placed among the four or five princi[p. 12]pal poets of his own country, he occupies a position of enviable distinction among those of the prouder nation that soon became, for a time, its masters.[10]

Montemayor, Polo, and their followers in prose pastorals, scattered bucolic verse of all kinds freely through their fictions; and sometimes, though seldom, they added to the interest and merit of their stories by this sort of ornament. One of those who had least success in it was Cervantes; and of those who had most, Balbuena stands in the first rank. His “Golden Age” contains some of the best and most original eclogues in the language; written, indeed, rather in the free, rustic tone of Theocritus, than with the careful finish of Virgil, but not on that account the less attractive.[11]

Of Luis Barahona de Soto, we possess an eclogue better than any thing else he has left us;[12] and of Pedro de Padilla, the friend of Cervantes and of Silvestre, a remarkable improvisator and a much loved man, we have a number of pastoral poems which carry with them a picturesque, antique air, from being made up in part of ballads and villancicos.[13] Pedro de Enzinas[p. 13] attempted to write religious eclogues, and failed;[14] but, in the established forms, Juan de Morales and Gomez Tapia, who are hardly known except for single attempts of this kind,[15] and Vicente Espinel,—among whose eclogues, that in which a Soldier and a Shepherd discuss the Spanish wars in Italy is both original and poetical,[16]—were all successful.

The eclogues of Lope de Vega, of which we have already spoken, drew after them a train of imitations, like his other popular poetry. But neither Balvas, nor Villegas, nor Carrillo, nor the Prince of Esquilache equalled him. Quevedo alone among his compeers, and he only if he is the author of the poems of the Bachiller de la Torre, proved himself a rival of the great master, unless we must give an equal place to Pedro de Espinosa, whose story of “The Genil,” half elegiac and half pastoral, is the happiest and most original specimen of that peculiar form of which Boscan in his “Hero and Leander” gave the first imperfect example.[17] Pedro Soto de Roxas,—who wrote short lyric poems with spirit, as well as eclogues,—Zarate, and Ulloa, belong to the same school, which was continued, by Texada Gomes de los Reyes, Barrios the Jew, and Inez de la Cruz the Mexican nun, down to the end of the century. But in all its forms, whether tending to become too lyrical, as it does in Figueroa, or too narrative, as in Espinosa,[p. 14] Spanish pastoral poetry shows fewer of the defects that accompany such poetry everywhere, and more of the merits that render it a gentle and idealized representation of nature and country life, than can perhaps be found in any other literature of modern times. The reason is, that there was more of a true pastoral character in Spain on which to build it.[18]

Quite as characteristic of the Spanish national genius as its pastorals were short poems in different forms, but in an epigrammatic spirit, which appeared through the whole of the best age of its literature. They are of two kinds. The first are generally amorous, and always sentimental. Of these, not a few are very short and pointed. They are found in the old Cancioneros and Romanceros, among the works of Maldonado, Silvestre, Villegas, Góngora, and others of less merit, to the end of the century. They are generally in the truest tone of popular verse. One, which was set to music, was in these few simple words:—

And another, of the same period, which was on a Sigh, and became the subject of more than one gloss, was hardly less simple:—

But of those a little longer and more elaborate a favorable specimen may be found in Camoens, who wrote such with tenderness and beauty, not only in his own language, but sometimes in Spanish, as in the following lines on a concealed and unhappy passion, the first two of which are probably a snatch of some old song, and the rest his own gloss upon them:—

The number of such compositions, in their different serious forms, is great; but the number of the second kind—those in a lighter and livelier tone—is still greater. The Argensolas, Villegas, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, the Prince Esquilache, Rebolledo, and not a few others, wrote them with spirit and effect. Of all, however, who indulged in them, nobody devoted to their composition so much zeal, and on the whole obtained so much success, as Francisco de la Torre, who, though[p. 16] of the culto school, seemed able to shake off much of its influence, when he remembered that he was a fellow-countryman of Martial.

He took for the foundation of his humor the remarkable Latin epigrams of John Owen, the English Protestant, who died in 1622, and whose witty volume has been often translated and printed at home and abroad down to our own times;—a volume, it should be noted, so offensive to the Romish Church as to have been early placed on its Index Expurgatorius. But La Torre avoided whatever could give umbrage to the ecclesiastical authorities of his time, and, adding a great number of original epigrams quite as good as those he translated, made a collection that fills two volumes, the last of which was printed in 1682, after its author’s death.[22]

But though he wrote more good epigrams, and in a greater variety of forms, than any other individual Spaniard, he did not, perhaps, write the best or the most national; for a few of those that still remain anonymous, and a still smaller number by Rebolledo, seem to claim this distinction. Of the sort of wit frequently affected in these slight compositions the following is an example:—

[p. 17]Rebolledo was sometimes happier than he is in this epigram, though rarely more national.

Didactic poetry in unsettled and uncertain forms appeared early in Spain, and took, from time to time, the air both of moral philosophy and of religious instruction. Specimens of it in the old long-line stanza are found from the age of Berceo to that of the chancellor Ayala; few, indeed, in number, but sufficiently marked in character to show their purpose. Later, examples become more numerous, and present themselves in forms somewhat improved. Several such occur in the Cancioneros, among the best of which are Ludueña’s “Rules for Good-Breeding”; “The Complaint of Fortune,” in imitation of Bias, by Diego de San Pedro; and the “Coplas” of Don Juan Manuel of Portugal, on the Seven Deadly Sins;—all of them authors known at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. Boscan’s poem on his own Conversion, that of Silvestre on “Self-knowledge,” that of Castilla on “The Virtues,” and that of Juan de Mendoza on “A Happy Life,” continue the series through the reign of Charles the Fifth, but without materially advancing its claims or its character.[24]

[p. 18]

In the age of Philip the Second, the didactic, like most of the other branches of Spanish poetry, spreads out more broadly. Francisco de Guzman’s “Opinions[p. 19] of Wise Men,” and especially his dull allegory of “Moral Triumphs,” in imitation of Petrarch, are, for their length, the most important of the different didactic poems which that period produced.[25] But more characteristic than either is the deeply religious letter of Francisco de Aldana to Montano, in 1573; and much more beautiful and touching than either is one written at about the same time by Juan Rufo to his infant son, filled with gentle affection and wise counsels.

Neither should a call made by Aldana, in the name of military glory, to Philip himself, urging him to defend the suffering Church, be overlooked. It breathes the very spirit of its subject, and may well be put in direct contrast with the earnest and sad persuasions to peace by Virues, who was yet a soldier by profession, and with Cantorál’s winning invitation to the quietness of a country life. Some of the religious poetry of Diego de Morillo and Pedro de Salas, in the next reigns, with several of the wise epistles of the Argensolas, Artieda, and Mesa, should be added; but they are all comparatively short poems, except those by Morillo on the Words of Christ upon the Cross, which extend to several hundred lines on each word, and which, though disfigured by antithesis and exaggeration, are strongly marked specimens of the Catholic didactic spirit.

In the mean time, and in the midst of this group,—partly because the way had been already prepared for it by the publication, in 1591, of a good translation of Horace’s “Art of Poetry” by Espinel, and partly[p. 20] from other causes,[26]—we have, at last, a proper didactic poem, or rather an attempt at one. It is by Juan de la Cueva, who in 1605 wrote in terza rima three epistles, which he entitled “Egemplar Poético,” and which constitute the oldest formal and original effort of the kind in the Spanish language. Regarded as a whole, they are, indeed, far from being a complete Art of Poetry, and in some parts they are injudicious and inconsequent; but they not unfrequently contain passages of acute criticism in flowing verse, and they have, besides, the merit of nationality in their tone. In all respects, they are better than an absurd didactic poem, by the same author, on “The Inventors of Things,” which he wrote three years later, and which shows, as he showed elsewhere, that he adventured in too many departments.[27]

Pablo de Céspedes, a sculptor and painter of the same period,—now better known as a man of learning and a poet,—came nearer to success than Cueva. He was born in 1538, at Córdova, and died there, a minor canon of its magnificent cathedral, at the age of seventy; but he spent a part of his life in Italy and at Seville, and devoted much of his leisure to letters. Among other works, he began a poem, in ottava rima,[p. 21] on “The Art of Painting.” Whether it was ever finished is uncertain; but all we possess of it is a series of fragments, amounting, when taken together, to six or seven hundred lines, which were inserted in a prose treatise on the same subject by his friend Francisco Pacheco, and printed above forty years after their author’s death. They are, however, such as to make us regret that we have received no more. Their versification is excellent, and their poetical energy and compactness are uniform. Perhaps the best passage that has been preserved is the description of a horse,—the animal of whose race the poet’s native city has always been proud,—and of which, it is evident, a single noble individual was pictured before his mind as he wrote. But other portions show much talent,—perhaps more than this does; especially one in which he explains the modes of acquiring practical skill in his art, and that more poetical one in which he discusses color.[28]

But the poems of Cueva and Céspedes were not printed till long after the death of their authors; and none of their contemporaries was inspired by like in[p. 22]fluences. The best that was done in didactic poetry, at about the same time, was the slight, but pleasant, sort of defence of his own irregularities produced by Lope de Vega, under the name of “The New Art of Writing Plays”; and the best, written later in the century, were the “Selvas,” as he called them, or poems in irregular verse, by Count Rebolledo, on the Arts of War and Civil Government, which date from 1652, but which are little more than rhymed prose. A long poem in ten cantos, and in the old quintilla verse, by Trapeza, published in 1612, and entitled “The Cross,” because it is a sort of exposition of all the theological virtues attributed to that holy emblem, is too dull to be noticed, even if it were more strictly didactic in its form.[29]

Some other kindred attempts should, however, be remembered, of which the oldest, made in the spirit of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries throughout Europe, were in the form called “Emblems,” or explanations in verse for hieroglyphical devices. The most successful of these were probably the Emblems of Daza, in 1549, imitated from the more famous Latin ones of Alciatus; and those of Covarrubias, published originally in Spanish by their author in 1591, and afterwards translated by him into Latin;—both of them curious specimens of this peculiar style of composition, and as agreeable, perhaps, as any which the age of Emblems produced.[30]

[p. 23]

The other form was that in which the didactic runs into the descriptive. Of this the most poetical example in Spanish is by Dicastillo, a Carthusian monk, at Saragossa, who published, in 1637, under the auspices of his friend Mencos, a long poetical correspondence, intended to teach the vanity of human things, and the happiness and merit to be found in a life of penitential seclusion. The parts that relate to the author himself are sometimes touching; but the rest is of very unequal worth,—the better portions being devoted to a description of the grand and sombre monastery of which he was an inmate, and of the observances to which his life there was devoted.[31] Castilian verse, however, did not often take a descriptive character, except when it appeared in the form of eclogues and idyls; and even then it is almost always marked by an ingenuity and brilliancy far from the healthy tone inspired by a sincere love of what is grand or beautiful in nature;—a remark which finds ample illustration in the poems devoted to the Spanish conquests in America, where the marvellous tropical vegetation of the valleys through which the wild adventurers wound their way, and the snow-capped volcanoes that crowned the sierras above their heads, seem to have failed alike to stir their imaginations or overawe their courage.[32]

[p. 24]But except these irregular varieties of didactic poetry, we have, for the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nothing to add to what we have already noticed, beyond a repetition of the old forms of epistles and silvas, which so frequently occur in the works of Castillejo, Ledesma, Lope de Vega, Jauregui, Zarate, and their contemporaries. Nor could we reasonably expect more. Neither the popular character of Spanish poetry, nor the severe nature of the Spanish ecclesiastical and political constitutions of government, was favorable to the development of this particular form of verse, or likely to tolerate it on any important subject. Didactic poetry remained, therefore, at the end of the period, as it was at the beginning, one of the feeblest and least successful departments of the national literature.[33]

The collection and publication of the popular ballads of the country in the Cancioneros and Romanceros, in the sixteenth century, attracted to them a kind and degree of attention they had failed to receive during the long period in which they had been floating about among the unrecorded traditions of the common people. There was so much that was beautiful in them, so much that appealed successfully to the best recollections of all classes, so much directly connected with the great periods of the national glory, that the minds of all were stirred by them, as soon as they appeared in a permanent form, and they became, at once, favorites of the more cultivated portion of the people, as they had always been of the humble hearts that gave them birth. The natural consequence followed;—they were imitated;—and not merely by poets who occasionally wrote in this among other forms of verse, but by persons who composed them in large numbers and published them by volumes.[34]

[p. 26]

The first of these persons was Lorenzo de Sepúlveda, whose Ballad-book can be traced back to 1551, the very year after the appearance, at Saragossa, of the earliest collection of popular and anonymous ballads, gathered from the memories of the people. The attempt of Sepúlveda was made in the right direction; for he founded it almost entirely on the old Castilian Chronicles, and appealed, as they did, to popular tradition and the national feelings for his support. In his Preface, he says, that his ballads “ought to be more savory than many others, because not only are they true and drawn from the truest histories he could find, but written in the Castilian measure and in the tone of the old ballads, which,” he adds, “is now in fashion. They were taken,” he declares, “literally from the Chronicle which was compiled by the most serene king Don Alfonso; the same who, for his good letters and royal desires, and great learning in all branches of knowledge, was called ‘The Wise.’” In fact, more than three fourths of this curious volume consist of ballads taken from the “General Chronicle of Spain,” often employing its very words, and always imbued with its spirit. The rest is made up chiefly of ballads founded on sacred and ancient history, or on mythological and other stories of an imaginary nature.

But, unfortunately, Sepúlveda was not truly a poet, and therefore, though he sought his subjects in good sources and seldom failed to select them well, he yet failed to give any more of a poetical coloring to his ballads than he found in the old chronicles he followed. He was, however, successful as far as the general favor[p. 27] was concerned; for not only was his entire work reprinted at least four times, but the separate ballads in it constantly reappear in the old collections[35] that were, from time to time, published to meet the popular demand.

Quite as characteristic of the period is a small selection of ballads printed for the first time in 1564. It was made by some person of distinction, who sent it to Alonso de Fuentes, with a request that he would furnish it with all needful explanations in prose. This he did; but the original collector died before it was published. Of the forty ballads of which it consists, ten are on subjects from the Bible; ten from Roman history; ten from other portions of ancient history; and the remainder from the history of Spain, coming down to the fall of Granada. We are not told where they were obtained, and none of them has much value;—the great merit of the whole, in the eyes of those who were concerned in their publication, consisting, no doubt, in the wearisome historical and moral commentary by which each is followed.

Fuentes, however, who intimates that the task was hardly worthy of his position, may have had a better taste in such things than the person who employed him; for, in a prefatory epistle, he gives us, of his own accord, the following ballad, evidently very old, if not very spirited, which he attributes to Alfonso the Wise. But it is no otherwise the work of that monarch than that all but the last stanzas are taken from the[p. 28] remarkable letter he wrote on the disastrous position of his affairs in 1280, when, by the rebellion of his son and the desertion of the higher ecclesiastics of his kingdom, he was reduced, in his old age, to misery and despair,—a letter already cited, and more poetical than the ballad founded on it.

Juan de Timoneda, partly bookseller and partly poet,—the friend of Lope de Rueda, and, like him, the author of farces acted in the public squares of Valencia,—was, both from his occupations and tastes, a person who would naturally understand the general poetical feeling and wants of his time. In consequence of this, probably, he published, in 1573, a collection of ballads, entitled “The Rose,” consisting, in no small degree, of his own compositions, but containing, also, some by other and older poets. Taken together, they constitute a volume of nearly seven hundred pages, divided into “The Rose of Love”; “The Spanish Rose”; “The Gentile Rose,” so called, because its subjects are heathen; and “The Royal Rose,” which is on the fates and fortunes of princes;—the whole being followed by about a hundred pages of popular, miscellaneous verse, rustic songs, and fanciful glosses.

The best parts of this large collection are the ballads gathered by its author from popular tradition, most of which were soon published in other Roman[p. 30]ceros, with the variations their origin necessarily involved. The poorest parts are those written by himself,—such as the last division, which is entirely his own, and is not superior to the similar ballads in Sepúlveda and Fuentes. As a collection, however, it is important; because it shows how true the Spanish people remained to their old traditions, and how constantly they claimed to have the best portions of their history repeated to them in the old forms to which they had so long been accustomed. In another point of view, also, it is of consequence. It furnishes ballads on the early heroes of Spain, some of which are needed to fill up two or three of the best among their traditional stories, while others come down, with similar accounts of later heroes, to the end of the Moorish wars.[37]

In 1583, the series of such popular works was still further continued by Pedro de Padilla, who published a Romancero containing sixty-three long ballads of his own,—about half of them taken from uncertain traditions, or from fables like those of Ariosto, and the others from the known history of Spain, which they follow down through the times of Charles the Fifth and the Flemish wars of Philip the Second. The Italian measures several times intrude, where they can produce only an awkward and incongruous effect; and the rest of the volume, not devoted to ballads,—except fifty villancicos, which are full of the old popular spirit,—is composed of poems in the Italian manner, that add nothing to its value.[38]

[p. 31]

Juan de la Cueva, finding the old national subjects thus seized upon by his predecessors, resorted, it would seem, from necessity, to the histories of Greece and Rome for his materials, and in 1587 published a volume containing above a hundred ballads, which he divided into ten books, placing nine of them under the protection of the nine Muses, and the other under that of Apollo. Their poetical merit is inconsiderable. The best are a few whose subjects are drawn from the old Castilian Chronicle, like that on the sad story of Doña Teresa, who, after being wedded against her will to the Moorish king of Toledo, was miraculously permitted to take refuge in a convent, rather than consummate her hated marriage with an infidel. Two ballads, however, in which the author gives an account of himself and of his literary undertakings, are more curious;—the latter containing an amusing account of some of the bad poets of his time.[39]

The publication of the first part of “The Civil Wars of Granada,” by Hita, in 1595, containing about sixty ballads, some of them very old, and several of great poetical merit, increased, no doubt, the impulse which the frequent appearance of volumes of popular anonymous ballads continued to give to Spanish poetry in this attractive form.[40] This is yet more apparent in the new direction taken by ballad-writing, which from this[p. 32] time began to select particular subjects and address itself to separate classes of readers. Thus, in 1609, we have a volume of ballads in the dialect of the rogues, written in the very spirit of the vagabonds it represents, and collected by some one who concealed himself under the name of Juan Hidalgo;[41]—while in 1612, at the other extreme of the cycle, Valdivielso, the fashionable ecclesiastic, printed a large “Spiritual Ballad-book,” whose ballads are all on religious subjects, and all intended to promote habits of devotion.[42] In 1614 and 1622, Lope de Vega, always a lover of such poetry, gave to the religious world a collection of similar devout ballads, often reprinted afterwards;[43] and in 1629 and 1634, he contributed materials to two other collections of the same character,—the first anonymous, and entitled “A Bouquet of Divine Flowers”; and the other by Luis de Arellano, which, under the name of “Counsels for the Dying,” contains thirty ballads, several of which are by the principal poets of the time.[44]

[p. 33]Others, like Roca y Serna, wrote large numbers of ballads, but did not print them separately.[45] Those of the Prince Esquilache, some of which are excellent, amount to nearly three hundred. Antonio de Mendoza wrote about two hundred; and perhaps as many, in every possible variety of character, are scattered through the works of Quevedo; so that, by the middle of the seventeenth century, there can be no doubt that large and successful efforts had been made by the known authors of the period to continue the old ballad spirit by free contributions, both in separate volumes and in masses of ballads inserted among their other published works.

Meantime the old spirit itself had not been lost. The ballad-book known originally under the name of “Flor de Romances,” which we have already traced in its individual parts to five small volumes,—published between 1593 and 1597, in such widely different portions of Spain, that its materials were gathered from the soil of nearly the whole country,—continued to be valued, and was reprinted and enlarged, under the name of “El Romancero General,” four times; till, with the Ballad-book of 1550-1555, it comprehended nearly all the old ballads that had been preserved by tradition, together with not a few by Lope de Vega, Góngora, and other living authors. Out of these two vast storehouses, and from such other sources as could still yield suitable materials, smaller and more popular ballad-books were now selected and published. One appeared at Barcelona in 1582, and was reprinted there in 1602 and 1696, taken in a considerable degree from the collection of 1550, but containing, besides, ballads not[p. 34] found elsewhere, and among the rest, several on the history of the triple league and on the death of Philip the Second.[46] A ballad-book for “The Twelve Peers,” and their marvellous achievements, published for the first time in 1608, has continued to be a favorite ever since;[47] and four years afterwards appeared “The Ballad-Book of the Cid,” which has been printed and reprinted again and again, at home and abroad, down to our own times.[48] These were followed, in 1623, by the “Primavera,” or Spring of Ballads, by Perez, of which a second part was collected and published by Segura in 1629, comprehending together nearly three hundred;—most, but not all, of them known before, and many of them of great beauty.[49] And other ballad-books of the same sort, as well as these, continued to be printed in cheap forms for popular use till the old Castilian culture disappeared with the decay of the old national character.

But during the long period of a century and a half when this kind of poetry prevailed so widely in Spain, the ballads were not left to the formal Romanceros, whether anonymous, like the largest, or by known authors, like those of Sepúlveda and Cueva, nor even to persons who wrote them in great numbers and printed[p. 35] them in a separate department of their collected works, as did Prince Esquilache. On the contrary, between 1550 and 1700, hardly a Spanish poet can be found through whose works they are not scattered with such profusion, that the number of popular ballads that could be collected from them would, if brought together, greatly exceed in amount all that are found in the ballad-books proper. Many of the ballads which thus occur either separately or in small groups are picturesque and beautiful in the same way the elder ones are, though rarely to the same degree. Silvestre, Montemayor, Espinel, Castillejo, and, above all of his time, Lopez de Maldonado, wrote them with success, towards the end of the sixteenth century.[50] A little later, those of Góngora are admirable. Indeed, his more simple, childlike ballads, and those in which a gay, mischievous spirit is made to conceal a genuine tenderness, are unlike almost any of their class found elsewhere, and can hardly be surpassed.[51] But Góngora afterwards introduced the same affected and false style into this form of his poetry that he did into the rest, and was followed, with constantly increasing absurdities, by Arteaga, Pantaleon, Villamediana, Coronel, and the rest of his imitators, whose ballads are generally worse than any thing else they wrote, because, from the very simplicity and truth required by the proper nature of such compositions, they less tolerate an appearance of affectation.

[p. 36]Cervantes, who was Góngora’s contemporary, tells us that he composed vast numbers which are now lost; and, from his own opinion of them, we have no reason to regret their fate. Lope’s, on the contrary, which he preserved with a care for his own reputation that was not at all characteristic of Cervantes, are still numerous and often excellent; especially those that relate to himself and his loves, some of the best of which seem to have been produced at Valencia and Lisbon.[52] At the same time and later, good ballads were written by Quevedo, who descended even to the style of the rogues in their composition; by Bernarda de Fereira, a nun in the romantic convent of Buzaco, in Portugal; by Rebolledo, the diplomatist; and perhaps, though with some hesitation, we should add, by Solís, the historian.[53] Indeed, wherever we turn, in the Spanish poetry of this period, we find ballads in all their varieties of tone and character,—often by authors otherwise little known, like Alarcon, who, in the end of the sixteenth century, wrote excellent devout ballads,[54] or Diego de la Chica, who is remembered only for a single satirical one, preserved by Espinosa in the beginning of the seventeenth;[55]—but we always find them in the works of those poets of note who desired to stand well with the mass of their countrymen.

[p. 37]Nor could it be otherwise;—for ballads, in the seventeenth century, had become the delight of the whole Spanish people. The soldier solaced himself with them in his tent, and the muleteer amidst the sierras; the maiden danced to them on the green, and the lover sang them for his serenade; they entered into the low orgies of thieves and vagabonds, into the sumptuous entertainments of the luxurious nobility, and into the holiday services of the Church; the blind beggar chanted them to gather alms, and the puppet-showman gave them in recitative to explain his exhibition; they were a part of the very foundation of the theatre, both secular and religious, and the theatre carried them everywhere, and added everywhere to their effect and authority. No poetry of modern times has been so widely spread through all classes of society, and none has so entered into the national character. The ballads, in fact, seem to have been found on every spot of Spanish soil. They seem to have filled the very air that men breathed.[56]

The romances of chivalry, like the institutions on which they were founded, lingered long in Spain. Their grave fictions were suited to the air of the stern old castles with which the Moorish contest had studded large portions of the country, while their general tone harmonized no less happily with the stately manners which the spirit of knighthood had helped to impress on the higher classes of society, from the mountains of Biscay to the shores of the Mediterranean. Their influence, therefore, was great; and, as one natural result of its long continuance, other and better forms of prose fiction were discountenanced in Spain, or appeared later than they might have done under different circumstances;—a fact to which Cervantes alludes, when, even at the opening of the seventeenth century, he complains that Spanish books of the latter character were still rarely to be found.[57]

Fifty years, however, before that period, signs of a coming change are perceptible. The magnificent successes of Charles the Fifth had already filled the minds[p. 39] of men with a spirit of adventure very different from that of Amadis and his descendants, though sometimes hardly less wild and extravagant. The cruel wars unceasingly kept up with the Barbary powers, and the miseries of the thousands of captives who returned from Africa, to amaze their countrymen with tragical stories of their own trials and those of their fellow-sufferers, were full of that bitter romance of real life which outruns all fiction. Manners, too,—the old, formal, knightly manners of the nobility,—were beginning to be modified by intercourse with the rest of the world, and especially with Italy, then the most refined and least military country of Christendom; so that romantic fiction—the department of elegant literature, which, above every other, depends on the state of society—was naturally modified in Spain by the great changes going on in the external relations and general culture of the kingdom. Of this state of things, and of its workings in the new forms of fiction produced by it, we shall find frequent proofs as we advance.

The first form, however, in which a change in the national taste manifested itself with well-defined success—that of prose pastorals—is perhaps not one which would have been anticipated even by the more sagacious; though, when we now look back upon its history, we can easily discover some of the foundations on which it was originally built.

From the Middle Ages the occupations of a shepherd’s life had prevailed in Spain and Portugal to a greater extent than elsewhere in Europe;[58] and, probably in con[p. 40]sequence of this circumstance, eclogues and bucolics were early known in the poetry of both countries, and became connected in both with the origin of the popular drama. On the other hand, the military spirit of such a civilization as existed in Spain down to the sixteenth century may have gladly turned away from such a monotonous exaggeration of its own character as is found in the romances of chivalry, and sought refreshment and repose in the peace and simplicity of a fabulous Arcadia. At least, these are the two obvious circumstances in the condition and culture of Spain, that favored the appearance of so singular a form of fiction as that of prose pastorals, though how much influence either exercised it may now be impossible to determine.

On one point, however, we are not left in doubt. We know whence the impulse came that called forth such a work for the first time in Castilian literature, and when it appeared there. It was Sannazaro,—a Neapolitan gentleman, whose family had been carried from Spain to Naples by the political revolutions of the preceding century,—who is the true father of the modern prose pastoral, which, from him, passed directly to Spain, and, during a long period of success in that country, never entirely lost the character its author had originally impressed upon it. His “Arcadia”—written, probably, without any reference to the Greek pastoral of Longus, but hardly without a knowledge of the “Ameto” of Boccaccio and the Eclogues of Bembo—was first published entire, at Naples, in 1504.[59] It is a genuine pastoral romance in prose and verse, in which, with a slight connecting narrative, and under the disguise of the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses, Sannazaro[p. 41] relates adventures that really occurred to him and to some of his friends;—he himself appearing under the name of Sincero, who is its principal personage. Such a work, of course, is somewhat fantastic from its very nature; but the fiction of Sannazaro was written in the purest and most graceful Italian, and had a great success;—a success which, perhaps, from the Spanish connections of his family, was early extended to Spain. At any rate, Spain was the first foreign country where the Arcadia was imitated, and was afterwards the only one where such works appeared in large numbers, and established a lasting influence.

It is singular, however, that, like the romances of chivalry, pastoral romance was first introduced into Spain by a Portuguese,—by George of Montemayor, a native of the town of that name, near Coimbra. When he was born we are not told; probably it was before 1520. In his youth he was a soldier; but later, from his skill in music, he became attached to the travelling chapel of the prince of Spain, afterwards Philip the Second, and thus enjoyed an opportunity of visiting foreign countries, especially Italy and Flanders. But his mind was little cultivated by study. He knew no Latin, which even those of the humblest literary attainments were wont to acquire, in the age when he lived; so that his success is due to his own genius and to the promptings of that passion which gave its color to his life. Probably he left Spain from disappointment in love; probably, too, he perished in a duel at Turin, in 1561. But we know nothing more of him with any tolerable certainty.[60]

His “Diana Enamorada,” the chief of his works,[p. 42] was first printed at Valencia, in 1542.[61] It is written in good Castilian, like his poetry, which is published separately, though, like that, with some intermixture of his native Portuguese;[62] and it contains, as he tells us, stories of adventures which really occurred.[63] We know, too, that, under the name of Sereno, he was himself its hero; and Lope de Vega adds, that Diana, its heroine, was a lady of Valencia de Don Juan, a town near the city of Leon.[64] Montemayor’s purpose, therefore, like that of Sannazaro, is to give, in the forms of a pastoral romance, an account of some events in his own life and in the lives of a few of his friends. To effect this, he brings together on the banks of the Ezla, at the foot of the mountains of Leon, a number of shepherds and shepherdesses, who relate their respective stories through seven books of prose, intermingled with verse. But the two principal personages, Sereno and Diana,[p. 43] who are introduced at first as lovers, are separated by magic; and the romance is brought to an abrupt conclusion, little conformable to all the previous intimations, by the marriage of Diana to Delio, the unworthy rival of Sereno.

On first reading the Diana of Montemayor, it is not easy to understand it. The separate stories of which it is composed are so involved with each other, and so inartificially united, that we are constantly losing the thread of the principal narration;—a difficulty which is much increased by the mixture of true and false geography, heathenism, magic, Christianity, and all the various contradictory impossibilities that naturally follow an attempt to place in the heart of Spain, and near one of its best-known cities, a poetical Arcadia, that never existed anywhere. The Diana, however, better merits the name of a romance than the Arcadia, which served for its model. Its principal fiction is ampler and more ingeniously constructed. Its episodes are more interesting. Much of it is warm with the tenderness of a disappointed attachment, which, no doubt, caused the whole to be written. Some of the poetry is beautiful, especially the lyric poetry; and if its prose style is not so pure as that of Sannazaro, it is still to be remarked for its grace and richness. Notwithstanding its many defects, therefore, the Diana is not without an interest for us even at this remote period, when the whole class of fictions to which it belongs is discountenanced and almost forgotten; and we feel that only poetical justice was done to it when it was saved, by the good taste of the curate, in the destruction of Don Quixote’s library.

The Diana, as has been intimated, was left unfinished by its author; but in 1564, three years after his death, Alonso Perez, a physician of Salamanca, to whom Mon[p. 44]temayor, before he finally left Spain, had communicated his plan for completing it, published a second part, which opens in the enchanted palace of Felicia, where the first ends, and gives us the adventures and stories of several shepherds and shepherdesses, not introduced before, as well as a continuation of the original fiction. But this second part, like the first, fails to complete the romance. It advances no farther than to the death of Delio, the husband of Diana,—which, according to the purpose of Montemayor, was to have been followed by her union with Sereno, her first and true lover,—and then stops abruptly, with the promise of yet a third part, which never appeared. Nor was it, probably, demanded with any earnestness; for the second, protracted through seven books, and considerably longer than its predecessor, is much inferior to it in merit. It lacks, in all its many stories, the tenderness which the disappointment of Montemayor had given to the first portion of the work; and, what perhaps is of no less consequence in this kind of composition, the prose is heavy and monotonous, and the verse worse.[65]

But this unfortunate attempt was not the only consequence of Montemayor’s success. The same year with that in which the work of Perez was published, another continuation appeared at Valencia, by Gaspar Gil Polo, a gentleman of that city, who was a Professor of Greek in its University.[66] The Diana of Polo has the[p. 45] merit of being shorter than either of its predecessors. It is divided into five books, and contains an account of the falsehood and death of Delio, and the marriage of Diana to Sereno, whom she finds when she is seeking the husband who had basely abandoned her for another shepherdess. Several episodes and much pastoral poetry of different kinds are skilfully inserted; but though the original plan of Montemayor seems to be completed, the book ends with the promise of a still further continuation, which, though the author lived nearly thirty years after he made it, seems never to have been written.[67] His work, however, was successful. Its prose has always found favor, and so have some portions of its verse; especially the cancion of Nerea in the third book, and several of the shorter poems in the last.[68]

The “Ten Books of Fortune and Love,” by Antonio de Lo Frasso, a Sardinian and a soldier, published in 1573, is the next Spanish romance of the same class with the Diana; but it is without merit, and was forgotten soon after it appeared.[69] Nine years later, in[p. 46] 1582, a better one was published,—the “Fílida,”—which passed early through five editions, and is still valued and read.[70] Its author, Luis Galvez de Montalvo, was born in Guadalaxara, a town near Alcalá, the birthplace of Cervantes; and, perhaps from this circumstance, they soon became acquainted, for they were long friends, and often praised each other in their respective works.[71] They seem, however, to have had very different characters; for, instead of the life of adventure led by Cervantes, Montalvo attached himself to the great family of Infantado, descended from the Marquis of Santillana, and passed most of his life as a sort of idle courtier and retainer in their ducal halls, near the place of his nativity. Subsequently he went to Italy, where he translated and published, in 1587, “The Tears of Saint Peter,” by Tansillo, and had begun a translation of the “Jerusalem Delivered” of Tasso, when he was cut off in the midst of his labors by an accidental death, in Sicily, about the year 1591.[72]

His “Fílida,” in seven parts, was written while he was attached to the Duke of Infantado; for he announces himself on the title-page as “a gentleman and a courtier,” and, in his Dedication to one of the family, says that “his greatest labor is to live idle, contented, and honored as one of the servants of their house.” The romance contains, as was usual in such[p. 47] works, the adventures of living and known personages, among whom were Montalvo himself, Cervantes, and the nobleman to whom it is dedicated. But the tone of pastoral life is not better preserved than it is in the other fictions of the same class. Indeed, in the sixth part, there is a most inappropriate critical discussion on the merits of the two schools of Spanish poetry then contending for fashionable mastery; and in the seventh is a courtly festival, with running at the ring, in which the shepherds appear on horseback with lances and armorial bearings, like knights. The prose style of the whole is pure and good; and among the poems with which it abounds, a few in the old Spanish measure may be selected that are nearly, if not quite, equal to the similar poems of Montemayor.

Cervantes, too, as we have already noticed, was led by the spirit of the times, rather, perhaps, than by his own taste, to begin—as an offering to the lady of his love—the “Galatea,” of which the first six books, published in 1584, were all that ever appeared.[73] This was followed, in 1586, by “Truth for the Jealous”; again a romance in six books, and, like the last, unfinished. It was written by Bartolomé Lopez de Enciso, of whom we know from himself that he was a young man when he wrote it, and that it was his purpose to publish a second part, of which, however, nothing more was heard. Nor can we regret that he failed to fulfil his promise. His fictions, which are occupied chiefly with the nymphs and shepherds of the Tagus, are among the most confused and unmeaning that have ever been attempted. His scene is laid, from its opening, in the days of the most ancient Greek mythology; but the Genius of Spain, in the fifth book, carries the[p. 48] same shepherds who thus figure in the first to a magnificent temple, and shows them the statues of Charles the Fifth, of Philip the Second, and even of Philip the Third, who was not yet on the throne;—thus confounding the earliest times of classical antiquity with an age which, at the end of the sixteenth century, was yet to come. Other inconsequences follow, in great numbers, as matters of course, while nothing in either the prose or the poetry is of value enough to compensate for the absurdities in the story. Indeed, few portions of Spanish literature show any thing more stiff and wearisome than the long declamations and discussions in this dull fiction.[74]

Another pastoral romance in six books, entitled “The Nymphs of the Henares,” by Bernardo Gonzalez de Bovadilla, was printed in 1587. The author, who was a native of the Canary Islands, confesses that he has placed the scene of his story on the banks of the Henares without having ever seen them; but both he and his romance have long since been forgotten. So has “The Shepherds of Iberia,” in four books, by Bernardo de la Vega, supposed to have been a native of Madrid, and certainly a canon of Tucuman, in Peru, whose ill-written story appeared in 1591. But that these, and all that preceded them, enjoyed for a time the public favor is made plain by the fact, that they are all found in the library of Don Quixote, and that three of them receive high praise from Cervantes;—much higher than has been confirmed by the decision of subsequent generations.[75]

[p. 49]

Some time, however, elapsed before another came to continue the series, except the “Arcadia” of Lope de Vega, which, though written long before, was not printed till 1598.[76] At last, “The Age of Gold,” by Bernardo de Balbuena, appeared. Its author, born on the vine-clad declivities of the Val de Peñas, in 1568, early accompanied his family to Mexico, where he was educated, and where, when only seventeen years old, he was already known as a poet. Once, at least, he visited his native country, and perhaps oftener; but he seems to have spent most of his life, either in Jamaica, where he enjoyed an ecclesiastical benefice, or in Puerto Rico, of which he was afterwards bishop, and where he died in 1627.

Of the manners of the New World, however, or of its magnificent scenery, his “Age of Gold in the Woods of Eriphile” shows no trace. It was printed at Madrid, in 1608, and might have been written, if its author had never been in any other city. But it is not without merit. The poetry with which it abounds is generally of the Italian school, but is much better than can be found in most of these doubtful romances; and its prose, though sometimes affected, is oftener sweet and flowing. Probably nothing in the nine eclogues—as its divisions are unsuitably called—is connected with either the history or the scandal of the times; and if this be the case, we have, perhaps, an explanation of the fact that it was less regarded by those contemporary with its publication than were similar works of inferior merit. But whatever may have been the cause, it was long overlooked; no second edition of it being de[p. 50]manded till 1821, when it received the rare honor of being published anew by the Spanish Academy.[77]

The very next year after the first appearance of “The Age of Gold,” Christóval Suarez de Figueroa, a native of Valladolid, a jurist and a soldier, published his “Constant Amaryllis, in Four Discourses,” crowded, like all its predecessors, with short poems, and, like most of them, claiming to tell a tale not a little of which was true.[78] Its author, who lived a great deal in Italy, was already known by an excellent translation of Guarini’s “Pastor Fido,”[79] and published, at different times afterwards, several original works which enjoyed much reputation.[80]

But he seems to have been a man of an unkind and unfaithful character. In a curious account of his own life which appeared in his “Traveller,” he speaks harsh[p. 51]ly and insidiously of many of his contemporaries; and towards Cervantes—who had just died, after praising every body most generously during his whole life—he is absolutely malignant.[81] His last work is dated in 1621, and this is the last fact we know in relation to him. His “Amaryllis,” which, as he intimates, was composed to please a person of great consideration, did not satisfy its author.[82] It is, however, written in an easy and tolerably pure style; and though it contains formal and wearisome discussions, like that in the first part on Poetry, and awkward machinery, such as a vision of Venus and her court in the second, it is the only one of his works that has been reprinted or much read within the last century.

A few pastoral romances appeared in Spain after the Amaryllis, but none of so much merit, and none that enjoyed any considerable degree of favor. Espinel Adorno;[83] Botelho, a Portuguese;[84] Quintana, who assumed the name of Cuevas;[85] Corral;[86] and Saave[p. 52]dra,[87] close up the series;—the last bringing us down to just about a century from the first appearance of such fictions in the time of Montemayor, and all of them infected with the false taste of the period. Taken together, they leave no doubt that pastoral romance was the first substitute in Spain for the romances of chivalry, and that it inherited no small degree of their popularity. Most of the works we have noticed were several times reprinted, and the “Diana” of Montemayor, the first and best of them all, was probably more read in Spain during the sixteenth century than any Spanish work of amusement except the “Celestina.”

All this seems remarkable and strange, when we consider only the absurdities and inconsequences with which such fictions necessarily abound. But there is another side to the question, which should not be overlooked. Pastoral romance, after all, has its foundation in one of the truest and deepest principles of our common nature,—that love of rural beauty, of rural peace, in short, of whatever goes to constitute a country life, as distinguished from the constrained life of a city, which few are too dull to feel, and fewer still so artificial as wholly to reject. It has, therefore, prevailed more or less in all modern countries, as we may see in Italy, from the success that followed Sannazaro; in France, from the “Astrea” of Durfé; and in England, from the “Arcadia” of Sir Philip Sidney;—the two latter being pastoral romances of enormous length, compared[p. 53] with any in Spanish; and the very last enjoying for above a century a popularity which may well be compared with that of the “Diana” of Montemayor, if, indeed, it did not equal it.[88]

No doubt, in Spain, as elsewhere, the incongruities of such fictions were soon perceived. Even some of those who most indulged in them showed that it was not entirely from a misapprehension of their nature. Cervantes, who died regretting that he should leave his “Galatea” unfinished, still makes himself merry more than once in his “Don Quixote” with all such fancies; and, in his “Colloquy of the Dogs,” permits one of them, who had been in shepherd service, to satirize the false exhibition of life in the best pastorals of his time, not forgetting his own among the rest.[89] Lope de Vega, too, though he published his “Arcadia” under circumstances which show that he set a permanent value upon its gentle tales, could still, in a play where shepherds are introduced, make one of them—who found a real life among flocks and herds in rough weather much less agreeable than the life he had read of in the pastorals—say, when suffering in a storm,—

[p. 54]Still, neither Cervantes, nor Lope, nor any body else in their time, thought seriously of discountenancing pastoral fictions. On the contrary, there was in their very style—which was generally an imitation of the Italian, that gave birth to them all—something attractive to a cultivated Castilian ear, at a time when the school of Garcilasso was at the height of its popularity and favor. Besides this, the real events they recorded, and the love-stories of persons in high life that they were known to conceal, made them sometimes riddles and sometimes masquerades, which engaged the curiosity of those who moved in the circles either of their authors or of their heroes and heroines.[91] But more than all, the glimpses they afforded of nature and truth—such genuine and deep tenderness as is shown by Montemayor, and such graceful descriptions of natural scenery as abound in Balbuena—were, no doubt, refreshing in a state of society stiff and formal as was that at the Spanish court in the times of Philip the Second and Philip the Third, and in the midst of a culture more founded on military virtues and the spirit of knighthood than any other of modern times. As long, therefore, as this state of things continued, pastoral fictions and fancies, filled with the dreams of a poetical Arcadia, enjoyed a degree of favor in Spain which they never enjoyed anywhere else. But when this disappeared, they disappeared with it.

The next form of prose fiction produced in Spain, and the one which, from its greater truth, has enjoyed a more permanent regard than the last, is found in those stories that have commonly gone under the name of “tales in the gusto picaresco,” or tales in the style of rogues. Taken as a class, they constitute a singular exhibition of character, and are, in fact, as separate and national in their air as any thing in the whole body of modern literature.

Their origin is obvious, and the more so from what is most singular in their character. They sprang directly from the condition of some portions of society in Spain when they appeared;—a condition, it should be added, which has existed there ever since, and contributed to preserve for the stories that bear its impress no little of the favor they have always enjoyed. Before speaking of them in detail, we must, therefore, notice the peculiar circumstances of the country, and the peculiar state of manners that gave them birth.

The wars of the opposing races and religions, that had constituted so much of the business of life, and so long engrossed the thoughts of men, in Spain, had, indeed,[p. 56] nearly ceased from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. But the state of character they had produced in the Spanish people had by no means ceased with them. On the contrary, it had been kept in the freshest activity by those vast enterprises which Charles the Fifth had pushed forward in Italy, France, and Germany, with such success, that the Spanish nation, always marked by a sanguine enthusiasm, had become fully persuaded that it was destined to achieve an empire which, covering the whole of the New World and whatever was most desirable in the Old, should surpass in glory and power the empire of the Cæsars in the days of its palmiest supremacy.

This magnificent result was a matter of such general faith, that men often felt a desire to contribute their personal exertions to accomplish it. Not only the high nobility of Spain, therefore, but all cavaliers and men of honor who sought distinction, saw, with the exception of places in the civil administration of affairs or in the Church, no road open before them on which they were so much tempted to enter as that of military enterprise. Laborious occupation in the business of common life and practical and productive industry were, in consequence, discountenanced, or held in contempt, while the armies were thronged, and multitudes of gentlemen and men of culture, like Cervantes and Lope de Vega, gladly served in them as simple soldiers.

But large as were the armies of Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second, all who desired it could not be soldiers. Many persons of decent condition, therefore, remained idle, because they found no occupation which was not deemed below their rank in society; while others, having made an experiment of military life sufficient to disgust them with its hardships, returned home[p. 57] unfitted for every thing else. These two sorts of persons formed a class of idlers that hung loose upon society in the principal cities of Spain, thriving at best by flattery and low intrigue, and sometimes driven for subsistence to crime. Their number was by no means small. They were known and marked wherever they went; and their characters, represented with much spirit, and often with great faithfulness, are still to be recognized in the proud, starving cavaliers of Mendoza and Quevedo, who stalk about the streets upon adventure, or crowd the antechamber of the minister, and weary his patience with their abject supplications for the meanest places it is in his power to bestow.

But there was yet another body of persons in Spain, nearly akin to the last in spirit, though differing from them in their original position, who figure no less in this peculiar form of fiction. They were the active, the shrewd, and the unscrupulous of the lower portions of society;—men who were able to perceive that the resources and power of the country, with all the advantages they desired to reach, were already in possession of an aristocratic caste, who looked to them for nothing but a sincere and faithful loyalty. During a long period,—the period of danger and trouble at home,—the fidelity of this class had been complete and unhesitating; bringing with it little feeling of wrong, and perhaps no sense of degradation; for such men, in such times, claimed from their superiors only protection, and, receiving this, asked for nothing else.

At last, however, other prospects opened upon them. Peace came gradually, as the Moors were driven out; and with it came a sense of independence and personal rights, which sometimes expressed itself in social restlessness, as in the frequent troubles at the universities;[p. 58] and sometimes, as in the wars of the Comuneros, in open rebellion. Contemporary, too, with these upward struggles of the masses of the people, which were always successfully rebuked and repressed, came the conquests in America, pouring such floods of wealth as the world had never before seen upon a country that had for ages been one of the poorest and most suffering in Europe. The easily got treasure—which was at first only in the hands of military adventurers or of those who had obtained grants of office and territory in the New World—was scattered as lightly as it was won. The shrewd and unprincipled of the less favored classes, therefore, soon learned to gather round its possessors, as they came home with their tempting burdens, and found ready means to profit by the golden shower that fell on all sides, with a profusion which carried an unhealthy action through every division of society. Little, however, could be obtained by men so humble and in a position so false, except by the arts of cunning and flattery. Cunning and flattery, therefore, were soon called forth among them in great abundance. The wealth of the Indies was a rich compost, that brought up parasites and rogues with other noxious weeds; and Paul, the son of a barber, and nephew of a hangman; Cortadillo, a young thief, whose father was a village tailor; and Little Lazarus, who could never settle his genealogy to his own satisfaction, became, in the literature of their country, the permanent representatives of their class;—a class well known under the degrading name of the Catariberas,[92] or the gayer one of Pícaros.

The first instance of a fiction founded on this state of things was, as we have already seen, the “Lazarillo de[p. 59] Tórmes” of Mendoza, which was published as early as 1554; a bold, unfinished sketch of the life of a rogue, from the very lowest condition in society. This was followed, forty-five years afterwards, by the “Guzman de Alfarache” of Mateo Aleman, the most ample portraiture of the class to which it belongs that is to be found in Spanish literature. What induced Aleman to write it we do not know. Indeed, we know little about him, except that he was a native of Seville, and wrote three or four other works of less consequence than this tale; that he was long employed in the treasury department of the government, and subjected to a vexatious suit at law in consequence of it; and that at last, retiring of his own choice to private life, he visited Mexico in 1609, and devoted the remainder of his days, either there or in Spain, to letters.[93] He may, at some period, have been a soldier; for one of his friends, in a eulogium prefixed to the second part of “Guzman de Alfarache,” sums up his character by saying that “never soldier had a poorer purse or a richer heart, or a life more unquiet and full of trouble, than his was; and all because he accounted it a greater honor to be a poor philosopher than a rich flatterer.”

[p. 60]

But whatever he may have been, or whatever he may have suffered, his claims to be remembered are now centred in his “Guzman de Alfarache.” As it has reached us, it is divided into two parts, the first of which was published at Madrid, in 1599. Its hero, who supposed himself to be the son of a decayed and not very reputable Genoese merchant established at Seville, escapes, as a boy, from his mother, after his father’s ruin and death, and plunges into the world upon adventure. He soon finds himself at Madrid, though not till he has passed through the hands of the officers of justice; and there undergoes all sorts of suffering, serving as a scullion to a cook, and as a ragged errand-boy to whomsoever would employ him; until, seizing a good opportunity, he steals a large sum of money that had been intrusted to him, and escapes to Toledo, where he sets up for a gentleman. But there he becomes, in his turn, the victim of a cunning like his own; and, finding his money nearly gone, enlists for the Italian wars. His star is now on the wane. At Barcelona, he again turns sharper and thief. At Genoa and Rome, he sinks to the lowest conditions of a street beggar. But a cardinal picks him up in the last city and makes him his page; a place in which, but for his bold frauds and tricks, he might long have thriven, and which at last he leaves in great distress, from losses at play, and enters the service of the French ambassador.

Here the first part ends. It was very successful; falling in with the vices and humors of the times, just as the loose court of Philip the Third, and the corrupting influences of his favorite, the Duke of Lerma, came to offer a sort of carnival to folly and vice, after the hypocrisy and constraints of the last dark years of Philip the Second. The Guzman, therefore, within a twelve[p. 61]-month after it appeared, passed through three editions; and, in less than six years, through twenty-six, besides being translated into French and Italian.[94] It was imitated, too, in a second part by some unknown person, probably by Juan Marti, a Valencian advocate, who disguised himself under the name of Mateo Luxan de Sayavedra, and published in 1603 what he boldly called a continuation of the Guzman.[95] But it was a base attempt, which, though not without literary merit, brought upon its author the just reproaches of Aleman, who intimates that his own manuscripts had been improperly used in its composition, and the just sarcasm of Aleman’s friend, Luis de Valdes, who exposed the meanness of the whole fraud.

In 1605, the genuine second part appeared.[96] It be[p. 62]gins with the life of Guzman in the house of the French ambassador at Rome, where he serves in some of the most dishonorable employments to which the great of that period degraded their mercenary dependants. But his own follies and crimes drive him away from a place for which he seems to have been in most respects well fitted, and he goes to Siena. At this point in his story, it seems to have occurred to Aleman to attack the Sayavedra who had endeavoured to impose upon the world with a false second part of the Guzman. He therefore introduces a person who is made thus to describe himself:—

“He told me,” says Guzman, who always writes in the style of autobiography, “he told me, that he was an Andalusian, born in Seville, my own native city, Sayavedra by name, with papers to show that he belonged to one of the oldest and most distinguished families among us. Who would suspect fraud under such a fair outside? And yet it was all a lie. He was a Valencian. I do not give his true name, for good reasons; but what with his flowing Castilian, his good looks, and his agreeable manners, it was impossible for me to suspect that he was a thief, a sponge, and a cheat, who had dressed himself up in peacock’s feathers only to obtain by falsehood such an entrance into my apartments that he could rob me of whatever he liked.”[97]

This personage, his history and adventures, fill too large a space in the second part of the Guzman; for when once Aleman had seized him, he seemed not to tire of inflicting punishment so soon as the reader does of witnessing it. Sayavedra robs and cheats Guzman[p. 63] early in this portion of the story; but afterwards accompanies him, in an equivocal capacity, through Milan, Bologna, and Genoa, to Spain, where, partly perhaps to get rid of him, and partly perhaps, as Cervantes did afterwards in the case of Don Quixote and Avellaneda, in order to end his story and prevent his enemy from continuing it any further, Aleman brings his victim’s life to an end.

The remainder of the book is filled with the adventures of Guzman himself, which are as wild and various as possible. He becomes a merchant at Madrid, and cheats his creditors by a fraudulent bankruptcy. He marries, but his wife dies soon; and then he begins, as a student at Alcalá, to prepare himself for the Church;—a consummation of wickedness which is prevented only by his marriage a second time. His second wife, however, leaves him at Seville, where he had established himself, and elopes with a lover to Italy. After this, he is reduced again to abject poverty; and, unable to live with his old, wretched, and shameless mother, he becomes major-domo to a lady of fortune, robs her, and is sent to the galleys, where he has the good luck to reveal a conspiracy and is rewarded with his freedom and a full pardon.

With this announcement the second part abruptly ends, not without promising a third, which was never published, though the author, in his Preface, says it was already written. The work, therefore, as it has come to us, is imperfect. But it was not, on that account, the less favored and admired. On the contrary, it was translated and printed all over Europe, in French, in Italian, in German, in Portuguese, in English, in Dutch, and even in Latin; a rare success, whose secret lies partly in the age when the Guzman appeared, and still[p. 64] more in the power and talent of the author.[98] The long moralizing discourses with which it abounds, written in a pure Castilian style, with much quaintness and point, were then admired, and saved it from censures which it could otherwise hardly have failed to encounter. These are, no doubt, the passages that led Ben Jonson to speak of it as

This, however, is not its real, or at least not its main character. The Guzman is chiefly curious and interesting because it shows us, in the costume of the times, the life of an ingenious, Machiavellian rogue, who is never at a loss for an expedient; who always treats himself and speaks of himself as an honest and respectable man; and who sometimes goes to mass and says his prayers just before he enters on an extraordinary scheme of roguery, as if on purpose to bring it out in more striking and brilliant relief. So far from being a moral book, therefore, it is a very immoral one, and Le Sage spoke in the spirit of its author, when, in the next century, undertaking to give a new French version of it, he boasted that he “had purged it of its superfluous moral reflections.”[100]

[p. 65]

It has, naturally, a considerable number of episodes. That of Sayavedra has already been noticed, as occupying a space in the work disproportionate to every thing but the anger of its author. Another—the story of Osmyn and Daraxa, which occurs early—is a pleasing specimen of those half-Moorish, half-Christian fictions that are so characteristic a portion of Spanish literature.[101] And yet another, which is placed in Spain and in the time of the Great Constable, Alvaro de Luna, is, after all, an Italian tale of Masuccio, used subsequently by Beaumont and Fletcher in “The Little French Lawyer.”[102] But, on the whole, the attention of the reader is fairly kept either upon the hero or upon the long discussions in which the hero indulges himself, and in which he draws striking, though not unfrequently exaggerated and burlesque, sketches of all classes of society in Spain, as they successively pass in review before him. At first, Aleman thought of calling his work “A Beacon-light of Life.” The name would not have been inappropriate, and it is the qualities implied under it—the sagacity, the knowledge of life and character, and the acuteness of its reflections on men and manners—that have preserved for it somewhat of its original popularity down to our own times.

In 1605 another story of the same class appeared,[p. 66] the “Pícara Justina,” or the Crafty Justina,—again a seeming autobiography, and again a fiction of very doubtful morality. It was written by a Dominican monk, Andreas Perez of Leon, who was known, both before and after its appearance, as the author of works of Christian devotion, and who had so far a sense of the incongruity of the Pícara Justina with his religious position, that he printed it under the assumed name of Francisco Lopez de Ubeda. He claims to have written it when he was a student at the University of Alcalá, but admits, that, after the appearance of the “Guzman de Alfarache,” he made large additions to it. It is, however, in truth, a mere imitation, and a very poor one, of Aleman. The first book is filled with a tedious, rambling account of Justina’s ancestors, who are barbers and puppet-showmen; and the rest consists of her own life, brought down to the time of her first marriage, marked by few adventures, and ending with an intimation, that, at the time of writing it, she had already been married yet twice more; that she was then the wife of Guzman de Alfarache; and that she should continue her memoirs still further, in case the public should care to hear more about her.

The Justina discovers little power of invention in the incidents, which are few and not interesting. Indeed, the author himself declares that nearly all of them were actual occurrences within his own experience; and this circumstance, together with the meagre “improvements,” as they are called,—or warnings against the follies and guilt of the heroine, with which each chapter ends,—is regarded by him as a sufficient justification for publishing a work whose tendency is obviously mischievous. Nor is the style better than the incidents. There is a constant effort to say witty and brilliant things; but it[p. 67] is rarely successful; and besides this, there is an affectation of new words and singular phrases which do not belong to the genius and analogies of the language, and which have caused at least one Spanish critic to regard Perez as the first author who left the sober and dignified style of the elder times, and, from mere caprice, undertook to invent a new one.[103]

But though the “Pícara Justina” proved a failure, the overwhelming popularity of “Guzman de Alfarache,” when added to that of “Lazarillo,” rendered this form of fiction so generally welcome in Spain, that it made its way into the ductile drama, and into the style of the shorter tales, as we have already seen when treating of Lope de Vega and Cervantes, and as we shall see hereafter when we come to speak of Salas Barbadillo and Francisco de Santos. Meantime, however, the “Escudero Marcos de Obregon” appeared; a work which has, on many accounts, attracted attention, and which deserves to be remembered, as the best of its kind in Spanish literature, except “Lazarillo” and “Guzman.”

It was written by Vicente Espinel, who was born about 1540, at Ronda, a romantic town, boldly built in the mountain range that stretches through the southwestern portion of the kingdom of Granada, and pic[p. 68]turesquely described by himself in one of the most striking of his poems.[104] He was educated at Salamanca, and, when Lope de Vega appeared as a poet before the public, Espinel was already so far advanced in his own career, that the young aspirant for public favor submitted his verses to the critical skill of his elder friend;[105]—a favor which Lope afterwards returned by praises in “The Laurel of Apollo,” more heart-felt and effective than he has usually given in that indiscriminate eulogium of the poets of his time.[106]

What was the course of Espinel’s life we do not know. It has generally been supposed that many of its events are related in his “Marcos de Obregon”; but though this is probable, and though some parts of that story are evidently true, yet many others are as evidently fictions, so that, on the whole, we are bound to regard it as a romance, and not as an autobiography. We know, however, that Espinel’s life in Italy was much like that of his hero; that he was a soldier in Flanders; that he wrote Latin verses; that he published a volume of Castilian poetry in 1591; and that he was a chaplain in Ronda, though he lived much in Madrid, and at last died there. He was regarded as the author of the form of verse called sometimes décimas, and sometimes, after himself, Espinelas; and he is said to have added a fifth string to the guitar, which soon led to the invention of the sixth, and thus completed that truly national instrument.[107] He died, according to Antonio, in 1634; but according to Lope de Vega, he was not alive in 1630.[p. 69] All accounts, however, represent him as having survived his ninetieth year,[108] and as having passed the latter part of his life in poverty and in unfriendly relations with Cervantes;—a fact the more observable, because both of them enjoyed pensions from the same distinguished ecclesiastic, the kindly old Archbishop of Toledo.[109]

The “Escudero Marcos de Obregon” was first published in 1618, and therefore appeared in the old age of its author.[110] He presents his hero, at once, as a person already past the middle years of life; one of the esquires of dames, who, at that period, were personages of humbler pretensions and graver character than those who, with the same title, had followed the men-at-arms of old.[111] The story of Marcos, however, though it opens upon us, at first, with scenes later in his life, soon returns to his youth, and nearly the whole volume is made up of his own account of his adventures, as he related them to a hermit whom he had known when he was a soldier in Flanders and Italy, and at whose cell he was now accidentally detained by a storm and flood, while on an excursion from Madrid.

In many particulars, his history resembles that of his[p. 70] predecessor, Guzman de Alfarache. It is the story of a youth who left his father’s house to seek his fortune; became first a student and afterwards a soldier; visited Italy; was a captive in Algiers; travelled over a large part of Spain; and after going through a great variety of dangers and trials, intrigues, follies, and crimes, sits down quietly in his old age to give an account of them all, with an air as grave and self-satisfied as if the greater part of them had not been of the most discreditable character. It contains a moderate number of wearisome, well-written moral reflections, intended to render its record of tricks, frauds, and crimes more savory to the reader by contrast; but though it falls below both the “Guzman de Alfarache” and the “Lazarillo” in the beauty and spirit of its style, it has more life in its action than either of them, and the series of its events is carried on with greater rapidity, and brought to a more regular conclusion.[112]

[p. 71]

Ten years later, another romance of the same sort appeared. It was by Yañez y Rivera, a physician of Segovia; who, as if on purpose to show the variety of his talent, published two works on ascetic devotion, as well as this picaresque romance; all of them remote from the cares and studies of his regular profession. He calls his story “Alonso, the Servant of Many Masters”; and the name is a sort of index to its contents. For it is a history of the adventures of its hero, Alonso, in the service, first of a military officer, then of a sacristan, and afterwards of a gentleman, of a lawyer, and of not a few others, who happened to be willing to employ him; and it is, in fact, neither more nor less than a satire on the different orders and conditions of society, as he studies them all in the houses of his different masters. It is evidently written with experience of the world, and its Castilian style is good; but something of its spirit is diminished by the circumstance, that it is thrown into the form of a dialogue. When Yañez published the first part, in 1624, he said that he had already been a practising physician twenty-six years, and that he should print nothing more, unless it related to the profession he followed. His success, however, with his Alonso was too tempting. He printed, in 1626, a second part of it, containing his hero’s adventures among the Gypsies and in Algerine captivity, and died in 1632.[113]

[p. 72]

Quevedo’s “Paul the Sharper,” which we have already noticed, was published the year after Yañez had completed his story, and did much to extend the favor with which works of this sort were received. Castillo Solorzano, therefore, well known at the time as a writer of popular tales and dramas, ventured to follow him, but with less good-fortune. His “Teresa, the Child of Tricks,” was published in 1632, and was succeeded immediately by “The Graduate in Frauds,” of which a continuation appeared in 1634, under the whimsical title of “The Seville Weasel, or a Hook to catch Purses.” This last, which is an account of the adventures of the Graduate’s daughter, proved, though it was never finished, the most popular of Solorzano’s works, and has not only been often reprinted, but was early translated into French, and gained a reputation in Europe generally. All three, however, are less strictly picaresque tales than the similar fictions that had preceded them;—not that they are wanting in coarse sketches of life and caricatures as broad as any in Guzman, but that romantic tales, ballads, and even farces, or parts of dramas, are introduced, showing that this form of romance was becoming mingled with others more poetical, if not more true to the condition of manners and society at the time.[114]

[p. 73]

Another proof of this change is to be found in “The Pythagoric Age” of Enriquez Gomez, first published in 1644; a book of little value, which takes the old doctrine of transmigration as the means of introducing a succession of pictures to serve as subjects for its satire. It begins with a poem in irregular verse, describing the existence of the soul, first in the body of an ambitious man; then in that of a slanderer and informer, a coquette, a minister of state, and a favorite; and it ends with similar sketches, half in poetry and half in prose, of a knight, a schemer, and others. But in the middle of the book is “The Life of Don Gregorio Guadaña,” in prose, which is a tale in direct imitation of Quevedo and Aleman, sometimes as free and coarse as theirs are, but generally not offending against the proprieties of life; and occasionally, as in the scenes during a journey and in the town of Carmona, pleasant and interesting, because it evidently gives us sketches from the author’s own experience. Like the rest of its class, it is most successful when it deals with such realities, and least so when it wanders off into the regions of poetry and fiction.[115]

But the work which most plainly shows the condition of social life that produced all these tales, if not the work that best exhibits their character, is “The Life[p. 74] of Estevanillo Gonzalez,” first printed in 1646. It is the autobiography of a buffoon, who was long in the service of Ottavio Piccolomini, the great general of the Thirty Years’ war; but it is an autobiography so full of fiction, that Le Sage, sixty years after its appearance, easily changed it into a mere romance, which has continued to be republished as such with his works ever since.[116]

Both in the original and in the French translation, it is called “The Life and Achievements of Estevanillo Gonzalez, the Good-natured Fellow,” and gives an account of his travels all over Europe, and of his adventures as courier, cook, and valet of the different distinguished masters whom he at different times served, from the king of Poland down to the Duke of Ossuna. Nothing can exceed the coolness with which he exhibits himself as a liar by profession, a constitutional coward, and an accomplished cheat, whenever he can thus render his story more amusing;—but then, on the other hand, he is not without learning, writes gay verses, and gives us sketches of his times and of the great men to whom he was successively attached, that are any thing but dull. His life, indeed, would be worth reading, if it were only to compare his account of the battle of Nordlingen with that in De Foe’s “Cavalier,” and his drawing of Ottavio Piccolomini with the stately portrait of the same personage in Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” Its faults, on the other hand, are a vain display of his knowledge; occasional attempts at grandeur and eloquence of style, which never succeed; and numberless[p. 75] intolerable puns. But it shows distinctly, what we have already noticed, that the whole class of fictions to which it belongs had its foundation in the manners and society of Spain at the period when they appeared, and that to this they owed, not only their success at home, in the age of Philip the Third and Philip the Fourth, but that success abroad which subsequently produced the Gil Blas of Le Sage,—an imitation more brilliant than any of the originals it followed.

It was inevitable that grave fiction suited to the changed times should appear in Spain, as well as fiction founded on the satire of prevalent manners. But there were obstacles in its way, and it came late. The old chronicles, so full of the same romantic spirit, and the more interesting because they were sometimes built up out of the older and longer-loved ballads; the old ballads themselves, still oftener made out of the chronicles; the romances of chivalry, which had not yet lost a popularity that, at the present day, seems nearly incredible;—all contributed, in their respective proportions, to satisfy the demand for books of amusement, and to repress the appearance and limit the success of serious and historical fiction. But it was inevitable that it should come, even if it should win little favor.

We have already noticed the attempts to introduce it, made in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, by Diego de San Pedro and his imitator, the anonymous author of “The Question of Love.” Others followed, in the reign of Charles the Fifth. The story, that very imperfectly connects the discussions between Aurelio and Isabella, on the inquiry, whether man gives more occasion for sin to woman, or woman to man, is one of[p. 77] them. It is a slight and meagre fiction, by Juan de Mores, which dates as far back as 1521, and which, in an early English translation, was at one time thought to have furnished hints for Shakspeare’s “Tempest.”[117] “The Loves of Clareo and Florisea,” published in 1552, by Nuñez de Reinoso, at Venice, where he then lived, is another;—a fiction partly allegorical, partly sentimental, and partly in the manner of the romances of chivalry, but of no value for the invention of its incidents, and of very little for its style.[118] The story of “Luzindaro and Medusina,” printed as early as 1553, which, in the midst of enchantments and allegories, preserves the tone and air of a series of complaints against love, and ends tragically with the death of Luzindaro, is yet a third of these crude attempts;[119]—all of which are of consequence only because they led the way to better things. But excepting these and two or three more trifles of the same kind, and of even less value, the reign of Charles the Fifth, so far as grave fiction was concerned, was entirely given up to the romances of chivalry.[120]

In the reign of Philip the Second, when the literature of the country began to develop itself on all sides, serious romances appeared in better forms, or at least[p. 78] with higher pretensions and attributes. Two instances of attempts in new directions, and with more considerable success, present themselves at once.

The first was by Hierónimo de Contreras, and bears the affected title of “A Thicket of Adventures.” It was published in 1573, and is the story of Luzuman, a gentleman of Seville, who had been bred from childhood in great intimacy with Arboleda, a lady of equal condition with himself; but when, as he grows up, this intimacy ripens into love, the lady rejects his suit, on the ground that she prefers a religious life. The refusal is gentle and tender; but he is so disheartened by it, that he secretly leaves his home in sorrow and mortification, and goes to Italy, where he meets with abundance of adventures, and travels through the whole peninsula, down to Naples. Wearied with this mode of life, he then embarks for Spain, but on his passage is taken by a corsair and carried to Algiers. There he remains in cruel slavery for five years. His master then gives him his freedom, and he returns to his home as secretly as he left it; but finding that Arboleda had taken the veil, and that the society to which he belonged had forgotten him, and had closed over the place he had once filled, he avoids making himself known to any body, and retires to a hermitage, with the purpose of ending his days in devotion.[121]

The whole story, somewhat solemnly divided into seven books, is dull, from want both of sufficient variety[p. 79] in the details, and of sufficient spirit in the style. But it is of some importance, because it is the first in a class of fictions, afterwards numerous, which—relying on the curiosity then felt in Spain about Italy, as a country full of Spaniards enjoying luxuries and refinements not yet known at home, and about Algiers, crowded with thousands of other Spaniards suffering the most severe forms of captivity—trusted, for no small part of their interest, to the accounts they gave of their heroes as adventurers in Italy, and as slaves on the coast of Barbary. Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and several more among the most popular authors of the seventeenth century, are among the writers of fictions like these.

The other form of grave fiction, which appeared in the time of Philip the Second, was the proper historical romance; and the earliest specimen of it, except such unsuccessful and slight attempts as we have already noticed, is to be found in “The Civil Wars of Granada,” by Ginés Perez de Hita. The author of this striking book was an inhabitant of Murcia, and, from the little he tells us of himself, must not only have been familiar with the wild mountains and rich valleys of the neighbouring kingdom of Granada, but must have had an intimate personal acquaintance with many of the old Moorish families that still lingered in the homes of their fathers, repeating the traditions of their ancient glory and its disastrous overthrow. Perhaps these circumstances led him to the choice of a subject for his romance. Certainly they furnished him with its best materials; for the story he relates is founded on the fall of Granada, regarded rather from within, amidst the feuds of the Moors themselves, than, as we are accustomed to consider it, from the Christian portion of Spain, gradually gathered in military array outside of its walls.

[p. 80]He begins his story by seeking a safe basis for it in the origin and history of the kingdom of Granada, according to the best authorities within his reach. This part of his work is formal and dry, and shows how imperfect were the notions, at the time he lived, of what an historical romance should be. But as he advances and enters upon the main subject he had proposed to himself, his tone changes. We are, indeed, still surrounded with personages that are familiar to us, like the heroic Muza on one side and the Master of Calatrava on the other; we are present with Boabdil, the last of the long line of Moorish sovereigns, as he carries on a fierce war against his own father in the midst of the city, and with Ferdinand and his knights, as they lay waste all the kingdom without. But to these historical figures are added the more imaginative and fabulous sketches of the Zegris and Abencerrages, Reduan, Abenamar, and Gazul, as full of knightly virtues as any of the Christian cavaliers opposed to them; and of Haja, Zayda, and Fatima, as fair and winning as the dames whom Isabella had brought with her to Santa Fé to cheer on the conquest.

But while he is thus mingling the creations of his own fancy with the facts of history, Hita has been particularly skilful in giving to the whole the manners and coloring of the time. He shows us a luxurious empire tottering to its fall, and yet, while the streets of its capital are filled with war-cries and blood, its princes and nobles abate not one jot of their accustomed revelry and riot. Marriage festivals and midnight dances in the Alhambra, and gorgeous tournaments and games in presence of the court, alternate with duels and feuds between the two great preponderating families that are destroying the state, and with skirmishes and single[p. 81] combats against the advancing Christians. Then come the cruel accusation of the Sultana by the false Zegris, and her defence in arms by both Moors and Christians; the atrocious murder of his sister Morayma by Boabdil, who suddenly breaks out with all the jealous violence of an Oriental despot; and the mournful and scandalous spectacle of three kings contending daily for empire in the squares and palaces of a city destined in a few short weeks to fall into the hands of the enemy that already surrounded its walls.

Much of this, of course, is fiction, so far as the details are concerned; but it is not a fiction false to the spirit of the real events on which it is founded. When, therefore, we approach the end of the story, we come again without violence upon historical ground as true as that on which it opened, though almost as wild and romantic as any of the tales of feuds or festivals through which we have been led to it. In this way, the temporary captivity of Boabdil and his cowardly submission, the siege and surrender of Alhama and Malaga, and the fall of Granada, are brought before us neither unexpectedly nor in a manner out of keeping with what had preceded them; and the story ends, if not with a regular catastrophe, which such materials might easily have furnished, at least with a tale in the tone of all the rest,—that which records the sad fate of Don Alonso de Aguilar. It should be added, that not a few of the finest of the old Spanish ballads are scattered through the work, furnishing materials for the story, rich and appropriate in themselves, and giving an air of reality to the events described, that could hardly have been given to them by any thing else.

This first part, as it is commonly called, of the[p. 82] Wars of Granada was written between 1589 and 1595.[122] It claims to be a translation from the Arabic of a Moor of Granada, and, in the last chapter, Hita gives a circumstantial account of the way in which he obtained it from Africa, where, as he would have us believe, it had been carried in the dispersion of the Moorish race. But though it is not unlikely, that, in his wanderings through the kingdom of Granada, he may have obtained Arabic materials for parts of his story, and though, in the last century, it was more than once attempted to make out an Arabic origin for the whole of it,[123] still his account, upon the face of it, is not at all probable; besides which, he repeatedly appeals to the chronicles of Garibay and Moncayo as authorities for his statements, and gives to the main current of his work—especially in such passages as the conversion of the Sultana—a Christian air, which does not permit us to suppose that any but a Christian could have written it. Notwithstanding his denial, therefore, we must give to Hita the honor of being the true author of one of the most attractive books in the prose literature of Spain; a book written in a pure, rich,[p. 83] and picturesque style, which seems in some respects to be in advance of the age, and in all to be worthy of the best models of the best period.

In 1604, he published the second part, on a subject nearly connected with the first. Seventy-seven years after the conquest of Granada, the Moors of that kingdom, unable any longer to bear the oppressions to which they were subjected by the rigorous government of Philip the Second, took refuge in the bold range of the Alpuxarras, on the coast of the Mediterranean, and there, electing a king, broke out into open rebellion. They maintained themselves bravely in their mountain fastnesses nearly four years, and were not finally defeated till three armies had been sent against them; the last of which was commanded by no less a general than Don John of Austria. Hita served through the whole of this war; and the second part of his romance contains its history. Much of what he relates is true; and, indeed, of much he had been an eye-witness, as we can see in his accounts of the atrocities committed in the villages of Felix and Huescar, as well as in all the details of the siege of Galera and the death and funeral honors of Luis de Quijada. But other portions, like the imprisonment of Albexari, with his love for Almanzora, and the jealousies and conspiracy of Benalguacil, must be chiefly or wholly drawn from his own imagination. The most interesting part is the story of Tuzani, which he relates with great minuteness, and which he declares he received from Tuzani himself and other persons concerned in it;—a wild tale of Oriental passion, which, as we have seen, Calderon made the subject of one of his most powerful and characteristic dramas.

If the rest of the second division of Hita’s romance[p. 84] had been like this story, it might have been worthy of the first. But it is not. The ballads with which it is diversified, and which are probably all his own, are much inferior in merit to the older ballads he had inserted before; and his narrative is given in a much less rich and glowing style. Perhaps Hita felt the want of the old Moorish traditions that had before inspired him, or perhaps he found himself awkwardly constrained when dealing with facts too recent and notorious to be manageable for the purposes of fiction. But whatever may have been the cause of its inferiority, the fact is plain. His second part, regarded as genuine history, is not to be compared with the account of the same events by Diego de Mendoza; while, regarded as a romance, he had already far surpassed it himself.[124]

The path, however, which Hita by these two works had opened for historical fiction amidst the old traditions and picturesque manners of the Moors, tempting as it may now seem, did not, in his time, seem so to others. His own romance, it is true, was often reprinted and much read. But, from the nature of his subject, he showed the Moorish character on its favorable side, and even went so far as to express his horror at the cruelties inflicted by his countrymen on their hated enemies, and his sense of the injustice done to the vanquished by the bad faith that kept neither the promises of Ferdinand and Isabella nor those of Don John.[125] Such sympathy with the infidel enemy that had so long held Spain in fee was not according to the spirit of the times. Only five years after Hita had[p. 85] published his account of the rebellion of the Alpuxarras, the remainder of the Moors against whom he had there fought were violently expelled from Spain by Philip the Third, amidst the rejoicings of the whole Spanish people; few even of the most humane spirits looking upon the sufferings they thus inflicted as any thing but the just retributions of an offended Heaven.

Of course, while this was the state of feeling throughout the nation, it was not to be expected that works of fiction representing the Moors in romantic and attractive colors, and filled with adventures drawn from their traditions, should find favor in Spain. A century later, indeed, a third part of the Wars of Granada—whether written by Hita or somebody else we are not told—was licensed for the press, though never published;[126] and, in France, Madame de Scudéri soon began, in “The Almahide,” a series of fictions on this foundation, that has been continued down, through the “Gonsalve de Cordoue” of Florian, to “The Abencerrage” of Chateaubriand, without giving any token that it is likely soon to cease.[127] But in Spain it struck no root, and had no success.

Perhaps other circumstances, besides a national feeling of unwillingness that romantic fiction should occupy the debatable ground between the Moors and the Christians, contributed to check its progress in Spain.[p. 86] Perhaps the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, destroying, by its ridicule, the only form of romance much known or regarded at the time, was not without an effect on the other forms, by exciting a prejudice against all grave prose works of invention, and still more by furnishing a substitute much more amusing than they could aspire to be. But whether this were so or not, attacks on all of them followed in the same spirit. “The Cryselia of Lidaceli,” which appeared in 1609,—and which, as well as a dull prose satire on the fantastic Academies then in fashion, bears the name of Captain Flegetonte,—assails freely whatever of prose fiction had till then enjoyed regard in Spain, whether the pastoral, the historical, or the chivalrous.[128] Its attack, however, was so ineffectual, as to show only the tendency of opinion to discourage romance-writing in Spain;—a tendency yet more apparent a little later, not only in some of the best ascetic writers of the seventeenth century, but in such works as “The Moral History of the God Momus,” by Noydens, published in 1666, which, as its author tells us distinctly in the Prologue, was intended to drive out of society all novels and books of adventure whose subject was love.[129]

[p. 87]Still, serious romance was written in Spain during the whole of the seventeenth century, and written in several varieties of form and tone, though with no real success. Thus, Gonzalo de Céspedes, a native of Madrid, and author of several other works, published the first part of his “Gerardo” in 1615, and the second in 1617. He calls it a Tragic Poem, and divides it into discourses instead of chapters. But it is, in fact, a prose romance, consisting of a series of slightly connected adventures in the life of its hero, Gerardo, and episodes of the adventures of different persons more or less associated with him; in all which, amidst much that is sentimental and romantic, there is more that is tragic than is common in such Spanish stories. It was several times reprinted, and was succeeded, in 1626, by his “Various Fortunes of the Soldier Píndaro,” a similar work, but less interesting, and perhaps, on that account, never finished according to the original purpose of its author. Both, however, show a power of invention which is hardly to be found in works of the same class produced so early, either in France or England, and both make pretensions to style, though rather in their lighter than in their more serious portions.[130]

Again in 1617,—the same year, it will be recollected, in which the “Persiles and Sigismunda” of Cervantes appeared,—Francisco Loubayssin de Lamarca, a Biscayan by birth, published his “Tragicomic History of[p. 88] Don Enrique de Castro”; in which known facts and fanciful adventures are mingled in the wildest confusion. The scene is carried back, by means of the story of the hero’s uncle, who has become a hermit in his old age, to the Italian wars of Charles the Eighth of France, and forward, in the person of the hero himself, to the conquest of Chili by the Spaniards; covering meanwhile any intermediate space that seems convenient to its author’s purposes. As an historical novel, it is an entire failure.[131]

A similar remark may be made on another work published in 1625, which takes in part the guise of imaginary travels, and is called “The History of Two Faithful Friends”; a story founded on the supposed adventures of a Frenchman and a Spaniard in Persia, and consisting chiefly of incredible accounts of their intrigues with Persian ladies of rank. Much of it is given in the shape of a correspondence, and it ends with the promise of a continuation, which never appeared.[132]

Many, indeed, of the works of fiction begun in Spain, during the seventeenth century, remained, like the Two Faithful Friends, unfinished, from want of encouragement and popularity; while others that were written were never published at all.[133] One of these last, called “The Fortunate Knight,” by Juan Valladares de Valdelomar, of Córdova, was quite prepared for the press in 1617, and is still extant in the original manuscript,[p. 89] with the proper licenses for printing and the autograph approbation of Lope de Vega. It is an historical novel, divided into forty-five “Adventures”; and the hero, like many others of his class, is a soldier in Italy, and a captive in Africa; serving first under Don John of Austria, and afterwards under Sebastian of Portugal. How much of it is true is uncertain. Regular dates are given for many of its events, some of which can be verified; but it is full of poetry and poetical fancies, and several of the stories, like that of the loves of the knight himself and the fair Mayorinda, must have been taken from the author’s imagination. Still, in the Prologue, all books of fiction are treated with contempt, as if the whole class were so little favored, that it was discreditable to avow the intention of publishing another, even at the moment of doing it. In the style of its prose, the Fortunate Knight is as good as other similar works of the same period; but the poems with which it is crowded, to the number of about a hundred and fifty, are of less merit.[134]

The discouragement just alluded to, whether proceeding from the ridicule thrown on long works of fiction by Cervantes, or from the watchfulness of the ecclesiastical authorities, or from both causes combined, was probably one of the reasons that led persons writing serious romances to seek new directions and unwonted forms in their composition; sometimes going as far as possible from the truth of fact, and sometimes coming down almost to plain history. Two instances of such deviations from the beaten paths—probably the only[p. 90] examples in their time of the class to which each belonged—should be noticed, for their singularity, if not for their literary merit.

The first is by Cosmé de Texada, and is called “The Marvellous Lion.” It was originally published in 1636, and consists of the history of “the great Lion Auricrino,” his wonderful adventures, and, at last, his marriage with Crisaura, his lady-love. It is divided into fifty-four Apologues, which might rather have been called chapters; and if, instead of the names of animals given to its personages, it had such poetical names as usually occur in romantic fiction, it would—except where it involves satirical sketches of the follies of the times—be a mere love-romance, neither more unnatural nor more extravagant than many of its fellows.

Such as it is, however, it did not entirely satisfy its author. The early portions had been written in his youth, while he was a student in theology at Salamanca; and when, somewhat later, he resumed his task, and brought it to a regular conclusion, he was already far advanced in the composition of another romance still more grave and spiritualized and still farther removed from the realities of life. This more carefully matured fiction is called “Understanding and Truth, the Philosophical Lovers”; and all its personages are allegorical, filling up, with their dreams and trials, a shadowy picture of human life, from the creation to the general judgment. How long Texada was employed about this cold and unsatisfactory allegory, we are not told; but it was not published till 1673, nearly forty years after it was begun, and then it was given to the public by his brother as a posthumous work, with the inappropriate title of “The Second Part of the Marvellous Lion.” Neither romance had a living interest capable of insur[p. 91]ing it a permanent success, but both are written in a purer style than was common in such works at the same period, and the first of them occasionally attacks the faults of the contemporary literature with spirit and good-humor.[135]

Quite different from both of them, “The New Kings of Toledo,” by Christóval Lozano, introduces only real personages, and contains little but the facts of known history and old tradition, slightly embellished by the spirit of romance. Its author was attached to the metropolitan cathedral of Toledo, and, with Calderon, served in the chapel set apart for the burial of the New Kings, as the monarchs of Castile were called from the time of Henry of Trastamara, who there established for himself a cemetery, separate from that in which the race ending with the dishonored Don Pedro had been entombed.

The pious chaplain, who was thus called to pray daily for the souls of the line of sovereigns that had constituted the house of Trastamara, determined to illustrate their memories by a romantic history; and, beginning with the old national traditions of the origin of Toledo, the cave of Hercules, the marriage of Charlemagne with a Moorish princess whom he converted, and the refusal of a Christian princess to marry a Moor whom she could not convert, he gives us an account of the building of the chapel, and the adventures of the kings who sleep under its altars, down as late as the death of[p. 92] Henry the Third, in 1406. From internal evidence, it was written at the end of the reign of Philip the Fourth, when Spanish prose had lost much both of its purity and of its dignity; but Lozano, though not free from the affectations of his age, wrote so much more simply than his contemporaries generally did, and his story, though little indebted to his own invention, was yet found so attractive, that, in about half a century, eleven editions of it were published, and it obtained for itself a place in Spanish literature which it has never entirely lost.[136]

After all, however, the serious and historical fictions produced in Spain, that merit the name of full-length romances, were, from the first, few in number, and, with the exception of Hita’s “Civil Wars of Granada,” deserved little favor. Subsequent to the reign of Philip the Fourth, they almost disappeared for above a century; and even at the end of that period, they occurred rarely, and obtained little regard.[137]

Short stories or tales were more successful in Spain, during the latter part of the sixteenth century and the whole of the seventeenth, than any other form of prose fiction, and were produced in greater numbers. They seem, indeed, to have sprung afresh, and with great vigor, from the prevailing national tastes and manners, not at all connected with the tales of Oriental origin, that had been introduced above two hundred years earlier by Don Juan Manuel, and little affected by the brilliant Italian school, of which Boccaccio was the head; but showing rather, in the hues they borrowed from the longer contemporary pastoral, satirical, and historical romances, how truly they belonged to the spirit of their own times, and to the state of society in which they appeared. We turn to them, therefore, with more than common interest.

The oldest Spanish tales of the sixteenth century, that deserve to be noticed, are two that are found in a small volume of the works of Antonio de Villegas, somewhat conceitedly called “El Inventario,” and pre[p. 94]pared for the press about 1550, though not published till 1565.[138] The first of them is entitled “Absence and Solitude,” a pastoral consisting of about equal portions of prose and poetry, and is as affected and in as bad taste as the ampler fictions of the class to which it belongs. The other—“The Story of Narvaez”—is much better. It is the Spanish version of a romantic adventure that really occurred on the frontiers of Granada, in the days when knighthood was in its glory among Moors as well as among Christians. Its principal incidents are as follows.

Rodrigo de Narvaez, Alcayde of Alora, a fortress on the Spanish border, grows weary of a life of inaction, from which he had been for some time suffering, and goes out one night with a few followers, in mere wantonness, to seek adventures. Of course they soon find what, in such a spirit, they seek. Abindarraez, a noble Moor, belonging to the persecuted and exiled family of the Abencerrages, comes well mounted and well armed along the path they are watching, and sings cheerily through the stillness of the night,—

A fight follows at once, and the gallant young Moor is taken prisoner; but his dejected manner, after a resistance so brave as he had made, surprises his conqueror, who, on inquiry, finds that his captive was on his way that very night to a secret marriage with[p. 95] the lady of his love, daughter of the lord of Coyn, a Moorish fortress near at hand. Immediately on learning this, the Spanish knight, like a true cavalier, releases the young Moor from his present thraldom, on condition that he will voluntarily return in three days and submit himself again to his fate. The noble Moor keeps his word, bringing with him his stolen bride, to whom, by the intervention of the generous Spaniard with the king of Granada, her father is reconciled, and so the tale ends to the honor and content of all the parties who appear in it.

Some passages in it are beautiful, like the first declaration of his love by Abindarraez, as described by himself; and the darkness that, he says, fell upon his very soul, when his lady, the next day, was carried away by her father, “as if,” he adds, “the sun had been suddenly eclipsed over a man wandering amidst wild and precipitous mountains.” His Moorish honor and faith, too, are characteristically and finely expressed, when, on the approach of the time for his return to captivity, he reveals to his bride the pledge he had given, and in reply to her urgent offer to send a rich ransom and break his word, he says, “Surely I may not now fall into so great a fault; for if, when formerly I came to you all alone, I kept truly my pledged faith, my duty to keep it is doubled now that I am yours. Therefore, questionless, I shall return to Alora, and place myself in the Alcayde’s hands; and when I have done what I ought to do, he must also do what to him seems right.”

The original story, as told by the Arabian writers, is found at the end of “The History of the Arabs in Spain,” by Conde, who says it was often repeated by the poets of Granada. But it was too attractive in it[p. 96]self, and too flattering to the character of Spanish knighthood, not to obtain a similar place in Spanish literature. Montemayor, therefore, borrowing it with little ceremony from Villegas, and altering it materially for the worse in point of style, inserted it in the editions of his “Diana” published towards the latter part of his life, though it harmonizes not at all with the pastoral scenery which there surrounds it. Padilla, too, soon afterwards took possession of it, and wrought it into a series of ballads; Lope de Vega founded on it his play of “The Remedy for Misfortune”; and Cervantes introduced it into his “Don Quixote.” On all sides, therefore, traces of it are to be found, but it nowhere presents itself with such grace or to such advantage as it does in the simple tale of Villegas.[139]

Juan de Timoneda, already noticed as one of the founders of the popular theatre in Spain, was also an early writer of Spanish tales. Indeed, as a bookseller[p. 97] who sought to make profit of whatever was agreeable to the general taste, and who wrote and published in this spirit several volumes of ballads, miscellaneous poetry, and farces, it was quite natural he should adventure in the ways of prose fiction, now become so attractive. His first attempt seems to have been in his “Patrañuelo,” or Story-teller, the first part of which appeared in 1576, but was not continued.[140]

It is a small work, which draws its materials from widely different sources, some of them being found, like the well-known story of Apollonius, Prince of Tyre, in the “Gesta Romanorum,” and some in the Italian masters, like the story of Griselda in Boccaccio, and the one familiar to English readers in the ballad of “King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,” which Timoneda probably took from Sacchetti.[141] Three or four—of which the first in the volume is one—had already been used in the construction of dramas by Alonso de la[p. 98] Vega and Lope de Rueda. All of them tend to show, what is proved in other ways, that such popular stories had long been a part of the intellectual amusements of a state of society little dependent on books; and, after floating for centuries up and down through the different countries of Europe,—borne by a general tradition or by the minstrels and Trouveurs,—were about this period first reduced to writing, and then again passed onward from hand to hand, till they were embodied in some form that became permanent. What, therefore, the Novellieri had been doing in Italy for above two hundred years, Timoneda now undertook to do for Spain. The twenty-two tales of his “Patrañuelo” are not, indeed, connected, like those of the “Decamerone,” but he has given them a uniform character by investing them all with his own easy, if not very pure, style; and thus, without anticipating it, sent them out anew to constitute a part of the settled literature of his country, and to draw after them a long train of similar fictions, some of which bear the most eminent names known among those of Spanish prose-writers.

Indeed, the very next is of this high order. It is that of Cervantes, who began by inserting such stories in the first part of his “Don Quixote” in 1605, and, eight years later, produced a collection of them, which he published separately. Of these tales, however, we have already spoken, and will, therefore, now only repeat, that, for originality of invention and happiness of style, they stand at the head of the class to which they belong.[142]

Others followed, of very various character. Hidalgo published, in 1605, an account of the frolics permitted[p. 99] during the last three days of Carnival, in which are many short tales and anecdotes, like the slightest and gayest of the Italian novelle;[143] and Suarez de Figueroa, who was no friend of Cervantes, if he was his follower, inserted other tales of a more romantic tone in his “Traveller,” which he published in 1617.[144] Perhaps, however, no writer of such fictions in the early part of the seventeenth century had more success than Salas Barbadillo, who was born at Madrid, about 1580, and died in 1630.[145] During the last eighteen years of his life, he published not less than twenty different works, all of which, except three or four that are filled with such dramas and poetry as Lope de Vega had made fashionable, consist of popular stories, neither so short as the tales of Timoneda, nor long enough to be accounted regular romances, but all written in a truly national spirit, and in a strongly marked Castilian style.

“The Ingenious Helen, Daughter of Celestina,” which is one of the earliest and most spirited of these fictions, appeared in 1612, and was frequently printed afterwards. It is the story of a courtesan, whose ad[p. 100]ventures, from the high game she undertakes to play in life, are of the boldest and most desperate kind. She is called the daughter of Celestina, because she is made to deserve that name by her talent and her crimes; but, with instinctive truth, she is at last left to perish by the most disgraceful of all the forms of a Spanish execution, for poisoning an obscure and vulgar lover. One or two minor stories are rather inartificially introduced in the course of the main narrative, and so are a few ballads, which have no value except as they serve to illustrate the ruffian life, as it was called, then to be found in the great cities of Spain. The best parts of the book are those relating to Helen herself and her machinations; and the most striking scenes, and perhaps the most true to the time, are those that occur when she rises to the height of her fortunes by setting up for a saint and imposing on all Seville.[146]

Of course, with such materials and incidents, the Helena takes much of its tone from the stories in the gusto picaresco, or the style of Spanish rogues. Quite opposite to it, therefore, in character and purpose, is “The Perfect Knight,”—a philosophical tale, not without some touch of the romances of chivalry. It is addressed to all the noble youth of the realm, at a time when the Cortes were assembled, and is intended to set the ideal of true knighthood before them, as before an audience the younger part of which might be excited to strive after its attributes and honors. To accomplish this, Barbadillo gives the history of a Spanish cavalier, who, travelling to Italy during the reign of Alfonso of Aragon, the conqueror of Naples, obtains the favor of that monarch, and, after serving him in the highest mil[p. 101]itary and diplomatic posts,—commanding armies in Germany, and mediating between imaginary kings of England and Ireland,—retires to the neighbourhood of Baia and enjoys a serene and religious old age.[147]

Again, “The House of Respectable Amusements” differs from both of the preceding fictions, and exhibits another variety of their author’s very flexible talent. It relates the frolics of four gay students of Salamanca, who, wearied by their course of life at the University, come to Madrid, open a luxurious house, arrange a large hall for exhibitions, and invite the rank and fashion of the city, telling stories for the amusement of their guests, reciting ballads, and acting plays;—all of which constitute the materials that fill the volume. Six tales, however, are really the effective part of it; and the whole is abruptly terminated by the dangerous illness of the most active among the four gay cavaliers who had arranged these Lenten entertainments.[148]

But it is not necessary to examine further the light fictions of Barbadillo. It is enough to say of the rest, that “The Point-Device Knight,” in two parts, is a grotesque story in ridicule of those who pretend to be first in every thing;[149]—that “The Lucky Fool” is what its name implies;[150]—that “Don Diego” consists of the love-adventures, during nine successive nights, of a gen[p. 102]tleman who always fails in what he undertakes;[151]—and that all of them, and all Barbadillo’s other productions, are within the range of talent of not a very high order, but uncommonly flexible, and dealing rather with the surface of manners than with the secrets of character which manners serve to hide. His latest work, entitled “Parnassian Crowns and Dishes for the Muses,” consists of a medley of verse and prose, stories and dramas, which were arranged for the press, and licensed in October, 1630; but he died immediately afterwards, and they were not printed till 1635.[152]

During the life of Barbadillo, and probably in some degree from his example and success, such fictions became frequent. “The Winter Evenings” of Antonio de Eslava, published in 1609, belong to this class, but are, indeed, so early in their date, that they may have rather given an impulse to Barbadillo than received one from him.[153] But “The Twelve Moral Tales” of Diego de Agreda, in 1620, belong clearly to his manner,[154] as does also “The Guide and Counsel for Strangers at Court,[p. 103]” published the same year, by Liñan y Verdugo,—a singular series of stories, related by two elderly gentlemen to a young man, in order to warn him against the dangers of a gay life at Madrid.[155] Lope de Vega, as usual, followed where success had already been obtained by others. In 1621, he added a short tale to his “Philomena,” and, a little later, three more to his “Circe”; but he himself thought them a doubtful experiment, and they, in fact, proved an unhappy one.[156] Other persons, however, encouraged by the general favor that evidently waited on light and amusing collections of stories, crowded more earnestly along in the same path;—Salazar, with his “Flowers of Recreation,” in 1622;[157]—Lugo, with his “Novelas,” the same year;[158]—and Camerino, with his “Love Tales,”[159] only a year later;—all the last six works having been produced in three years, and all belonging to the school of Timoneda, as it had been modified by the genius of Cervantes and the practical skill of Salas Barbadillo.

This was popular success; but it was so much in one direction, that its results became a little monotonous.[p. 104] Variety, therefore, was soon demanded; and, being demanded by the voice of fashion, it was soon obtained. The new form, thus introduced, was not, however, a violent change. It was made by a well-known dramatic author, who—taking a hint from the “Decamerone,” already in part adopted by Barbadillo, in his “House of Respectable Amusements”—substituted a theatrical framework to connect his separate stories, instead of the merely narrative one used by Boccaccio and his followers. This fell in, happily, with the passion for the stage which then pervaded all Spain, and it was successful.

The change referred to is first found in the “Cigarrales de Toledo,” published in 1624, by Gabriel Tellez, who, as we have already observed, when he left his convent and came before the public as a secular author, always disguised himself under the name of Tirso de Molina. It is a singular book, and takes its name from a word of Arabic origin peculiar to Toledo; Cigarral signifying there a small country-house in the neighbourhood of the city, resorted to only for recreation and only in the summer season. At one of these houses Tirso supposes a wedding to have happened, under circumstances interesting to a large number of persons, who, wishing in consequence of it to be much together, agreed to hold a series of entertainments at their different houses, in an order to be determined by lot and under the superintendence of one of their company, each of whom, during the single day of his authority, should have supreme control and be responsible for the amusements of the whole party.

The “Cigarrales de Toledo” is an account of these entertainments, consisting of stories that were read or related at them, poetry that was recited, and plays that were acted,—in short, of all that made up the various[p. 105] exhibitions and amusements of the party. Some portions of it are fluent and harmonious beyond the common success of the age; but in general, as in the descriptions and in the poor contrivance of the “Labyrinth,” it is disfigured by conceits and extravagances, belonging to the follies of Gongorism. The work, however, pleased, and Tirso himself prepared another of the same kind, called “Pleasure and Profit,”—graver and more religious in its tone, but of less poetical merit,—which was written in 1632, and printed in 1635. But, though both were well received, neither was finished. The last ends with the promise of a second part, and the first, which undertakes to give an account of the entertainments of twenty days, embraces, in fact, only five.[160]

The style they adopted was soon imitated. Montalvan, who, like his master, never failed to follow the indications of the popular taste, printed, in 1632, his “Para Todos,” or For Everybody, containing the imaginary amusements of a party of literary friends, who agreed to cater for each other during a week, and whose festivities are ended, as those of the “Cigarrales” began, with a wedding. Some of its inventions are very learnedly dull, and it is throughout less well arranged than the account of the entertainments near Toledo, and falls less naturally into a dramatic framework. But it shows its author’s talent. The individual stories are pleasantly told, especially the one called “At the End of the Year One Thousand”; and, as a whole, the “Para Todos” was[p. 106] popular, going through nine editions in less than thirty years, notwithstanding a very severe attack on it by Quevedo.[161] Its popularity, too, had the natural effect of producing imitations, among which, in 1640, appeared, “Para Algunos,”—For a Few,—by Matias de los Reyes;[162] and, somewhat later, “Para Sí,”—For one’s own Self,—by Juan Fernandez y Peralta.[163]

Meantime the succession of separate tales had been actively kept up. Montalvan published eight in 1624, written with more than the usual measure of grace in such Spanish compositions; one of them, “The Disastrous Friendship,” founded on the sufferings of an Al[p. 107]gerine captivity, being one of the best in the language, and all of them so successful, that they were printed eleven times in about thirty years.[164] Céspedes y Meneses followed, in 1628, with a series entitled “Rare Histories”;[165]—Moya, at about the same time, published a single whimsical story on “The Fancies of a Fright”; in which he relates a succession of marvellous incidents, that, as he declares, flashed through his own imagination while falling down a precipice in the Sierra Morena;[166]—and Castro y Anaya published, in 1632, five tales called “The Auroras of Diana,” because they are told in the early dawn of each morning, during five successive days, to amuse Diana, a lady who, after a long illness, had fallen into a state of melancholy.[167]

The fair sex, too, entered into the general fashionable competition. Mariana de Carbajal, a native of Granada, and descended from the ancient ducal families of San Carlos and Rivas, published, in 1638, eight tales, pleasing both by their invention and by the simplicity of their style, which she called “Christmas at Madrid,” or “Evening Amusements.”[168] And in 1637 and 1647, Ma[p. 108]ría de Zayas, a lady of the court, printed two collections; the first called simply “Tales,” and the last “Saraos,” or Balls; each a series of ten stories within itself, and both connected together by the entertainments of a party of friends at Christmas, and the dances and fêtes at the wedding of two of their number, during the holidays that followed.[169]

Again, slight changes in such fictions were attempted. Mata, in two dull tales, called “The Solitudes of Aurelia,” published in 1637, endeavoured to give them a more religious character;[170] and in 1641, André del Castillo, in six stories misnamed “The Masquerade of Taste,” sought to give them even a lighter tone than the old one.[171] Both found successors. Lozano’s “Solitudes of Life,” which are four stories supposed to be told by a hermit on the wild peaks of the Monserrate, belong to the first class, and, notwithstanding a somewhat affected style, were much praised by Calderon, and went through at least six editions;[172]—while, in the opposite direction, between 1625 and 1640, we have a number of the freest secular tales, by Castillo Solorzano, among which the best are probably “The Alleviations of Cassandra,[p. 109]” and “The Country-House of Laura,” both imitations of Castro’s “Diana.”[173]

In the same way, the succession of short fictions was continued unbroken, until it ceased with the general decay of Spanish literature at the end of the century. Thus we have, in 1641, “The Various Effects of Love and Fortune,” by Alonso de Alcalá; five stories, such as may be imagined from the fact, that, in each of them, one of the five vowels is entirely omitted;[174]—in 1645, “The Warnings, or Experiences, of Jacinto,” by Villalpando, which may have been taken from his own life, since Jacinto was the first of his own names;[175]—in 1663, “The Festivals of Wit and Entertainments of Taste,” by Andres de Prado;[176]—and, in 1666, a series collected from different authors, by Isidro de Robles,[177] and published under the title of “Wonders of[p. 110] Love.” All these, as their names indicate, belong to one school; and although there is an occasional variety in their individual tones, some of them being humorous and others sentimental, and although some of them have their scenes in Spain and others in Italy or Algiers, still, as the purpose of all was only the lightest amusement, they may all be grouped together and characterized in the mass, as of little value, and as falling off in merit the nearer they approach the period when such fictions ceased in the elder Spanish literature.

One more variety in the characteristics of this style of writing in Spain is, however, so distinct from the rest, that it should be separately mentioned,—that which has sometimes been called the Allegorical and Satirical Tale, and which generally took the form of a Vision. It was, probably, suggested by the bold and original “Visions” of Quevedo; and the instance of it most worthy of notice is “The Limping Devil” of Luis Velez de Guevara, which appeared in 1641. It is a short story, founded on the idea that a student releases from his confinement, in a magician’s vial, the Limping Devil, who, in return for this service, carries his liberator through the air, and, unroofing, as it were, the houses of Madrid, during the stillness of the night, shows him the secrets that are passing within. It is divided into ten “Leaps,” as they afterwards spring from place to place in different parts of Spain, in order to pounce on their prey, and it is satirical throughout. Parts of it are very happy; among which may be selected those relating to fashionable life, to the life of rogues, and to that of men of letters, in the large cities of Castile and[p. 111] Andalusia, though these, like the rest, are often disfigured with the bad taste then so common. On the whole, however, it is an amusing fiction,—partly allegorical and partly sketched from living manners,—and is to be placed among the more spirited prose satires in modern literature, both in its original form and in the form given to it by Le Sage, whose rifacimento has carried it, under the name of “Le Diable Boiteux,” wherever letters are known.[178]

Earlier than the appearance of the Limping Devil, however, Polo had written his “Hospital of Incurables,” a direct, but poor, imitation of Quevedo; and in 1647, under an assumed name, he published his “University of Love, or School for Selfishness,” a satire against mercenary matches, thrown into the shape of a vision of the University of Love, where the fair sex are brought up in the arts of profitable intrigue, and receive degrees according to their progress.[179] It is, in general, an ill-managed allegory, filled with bad puns and worse verse; but there is one passage so characteristic of Spanish wit in this form of fiction, that it may be cited as an illustration of the entire class to which it belongs.

“‘That young creature whom you see there,’ said the[p. 112] God of Love, as he led me on, ‘is the chief captain of my war, the one that has brought most soldiers to my feet and enlisted most men under my banners. The elderly person that is leading her along by the hand is her aunt.’ ‘Her aunt, did you say?’ I replied; ‘her aunt? Then there is an end of all my love for her. That word aunt is a counter poison that has disinfected me entirely, and quite healed the wound your well-planted arrow was beginning to make in my heart. For, however much a man may be in love, there can be no doubt an aunt will always be enough to purge him clean of it. Inquisitive, suspicious, envious,—one or the other she cannot fail to be,—and if the niece have the luck to escape, the lover never has; for if she is envious, she wants him for herself; and if she is only suspicious, she still spoils all comfort, so disconcerting every little project, and so disturbing every little nice plan, as to render pleasure itself unsavory,’ ‘Why, what a desperately bad opinion you have of aunts!’ said Love. ‘To be sure I have,’ said I. ‘If the state of innocence in which Adam and Eve were created had nothing else to recommend it, the simple fact that there could have been no aunts in Paradise would have been enough for me. Why, every morning, as soon as I get up, I cross myself and say, “By the sign of the Holy Rood, from all aunts deliver us this day, Good Lord!” And every time I repeat the Paternoster, after “Lead us not into temptation,” I always add,—“nor into the way of aunts either.”’”

The example of Quevedo was, again, followed by Marcos Garcia, who in 1657 published his “Phlegm of Pedro Hernandez,” an imaginary, but popular, personage, whose arms, according to an old Spanish proverb, fell out of their sockets from the mere listlessness of[p. 113] their owner. It is a vision, in which women-servants who spend their lives in active cheating, students pressing vigorously forward to become quacks and pettifoggers, spendthrift soldiers, and similar uneasy, unprincipled persons of other conditions, are contrasted with those who, trusting to a quiet disposition, float noiselessly down the current of life, and succeed without an effort and without knowing how they do it. The general allegory is meagre; but some of the individual sketches are well imagined.[180]

The person, however, who, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, succeeded best in this style of composition, as well as in tales of other kinds, was Francisco Santos, a native of Madrid, who died not far from the year 1700. Between 1663 and 1697, he gave to the world sixteen volumes of different kinds of works for popular amusement;—generally short stories, but some of them encumbered with allegorical personages and tedious moral discussions.[181] The oldest of the series, “Dia y Noche en Madrid,” or, as it may be translated, Life in Madrid, though a mere fiction founded on manners, is divided into what the author terms Eighteen Discourses. It opens, as such Spanish tales are too apt to open, somewhat pompously; the first scene de[p. 114]scribing with too much elaborateness a procession of three hundred emancipated captives, who enter Madrid praising God and rejoicing at their release from the horrors of Algerine servitude. One of these captives, the hero of the story, falls immediately into the hands of a shrewd and not over-honest servant, named Juanillo, who, having begun the world as a beggar, and risen by cunning so far as to be employed in the capacity of an inferior servant by a fraternity of monks, now undertakes to make the stranger acquainted with the condition of Madrid, serving him as a guide wherever he goes, and interpreting to him whatever is most characteristic of the manners and follies of the capital. Some of the tales and sketches thus introduced are full of life and truth, as, for instance, those relating to the prisons, gaming-houses, and hospitals, and especially one in which a coquette, meeting a poor man at a bull-fight, so dupes him by her blandishments, that she sends him back penniless, at midnight, to his despairing wife and children, who, anxious and without food, have been waiting from the early morning to have him return with their dinner. This little volume, several parts of which have been freely used by Le Sage, ends with an account of the captive’s adventures in Italy, in Spain, and in Algiers, given by himself in a truly national tone, and with fluency and spirit.[182]

“Periquillo”—another of these collections of sketches and tales, less well written than the last, except in the merely narrative portions—contains an account of a foundling, who, after the ruin and death of a pious couple that first picked him up at their door on a[p. 115] Christmas morning, begins the world for himself as the leader of a blind beggar. From this condition, which, in such Spanish stories, always seems to be regarded as the lowest possible in society, he rises to be the servant of a cavalier, who proves to be a mysterious robber, and after escaping from whom he falls into the hands of yet worse persons, and is apprehended under circumstances that remind us of the story of Doña Mencia in “Gil Blas.” He, however, vindicates his innocence, and, being released from the fangs of justice, returns, weary of the world, to his first home, where he leads an ascetic life; makes long, pedantic discourses on virtue to his admiring townsmen; and proves, in fact, a sort of humble philosopher, growing constantly more and more devout till the account of him ends at last with a prayer. The whole is interesting among Spanish works of fiction, because it is evidently written both in imitation of the picaresque novels and in opposition to them; since Periquillo, from the lowest origin, gets on by neither roguery nor cleverness, but by honesty and good faith; and, instead of rising in the world and becoming rich and courtly, settles patiently down into a village hermit, or a sort of poor Christian Diogenes. No doubt, he has neither the wit nor the cunning of Lazarillo; but that he should venture to encounter that shrewd little beggar in any way makes Periquillo, at once, a personage of some consequence.[183]

Yet one more of the works of Santos should be noticed; an allegorical tale, called “Truth on the Rack, or the Cid come to Life again.” Its general story is, that Truth, in the form of a fair woman, is placed on[p. 116] the rack, surrounded by the Cid and other forms, that rise from the earth about the scaffold on which she is tormented. There she is forced to give an account of things as they really exist, or have existed, and to discourse concerning shadowy multitudes, who pass, in sight of the company that surrounds her, over what seems to be a long bridge. The whole is, therefore, a satire in the form of a vision, but its character is consistently sustained only at the beginning and the end. The Cid, however, is much the same personage throughout,—bold, rough, and free-spoken. He is heartily dissatisfied with every thing he finds on earth, especially with the popular traditions and ballads about himself, and goes back to his grave well pleased to escape from such a world, “which,” he says, “if they would give it to me to live in, I would not accept.”[184]

Other works of Santos, like “The Devil let loose, or Truths of the other World dreamed about in this,” and “The Live Man and the Dead One,” are of the same sort with the last;[185] while yet others run even more to allegory, like his “Tarascas de Madrid,”[186] and his “Gi[p. 117]gantones,”[187] suggested by the huge and unsightly forms led about to amuse or to frighten the multitude in the annual processions of the Corpus Christi;—the satirical interpretation he gives to them being, that worse monsters than the Tarascas might be seen every day in Madrid by those who could distinguish the sin and folly that always thronged the streets of that luxurious capital. But though such satires were successful when they first appeared, they have long since ceased to be so; partly because they abound in allusions to local circumstances now known only to the curiosity of antiquarians, and partly because, in all respects, they depict a state of society and manners of which hardly a vestige remains.

Santos is the last of the writers of Spanish tales previous to the eighteenth century that needs to be noticed.[188] But though the number we have gone over is large for the length of the period in which they appeared, not a few others might be added. The pastoral romances from the time of Montemayor are full of them;—the “Galatea” of Cervantes, and the “Arcadia” of Lope de Vega, being little more than a series of such stories, slightly bound together by yet another that connects them all. So are, to a certain degree, the picaresque fictions, like “Guzman de Alfarache” and “Marcos de Obregon”;—and so are such serious fictions as “The Wars of Granada” and “The Spanish Gerardo.” The popular drama, too, was near akin to the whole; as[p. 118] we have seen in the case of Timoneda, whose stories, before he produced them as tales, had already been exhibited in the form of farces on the rude stage of the public squares; and in the case of Cervantes, who not only put part of his tale of “The Captive” in “Don Quixote” into his second play of “Life in Algiers,” but constructed his story of “The Liberal Lover” almost wholly out of his earlier play on the same subject. Indeed, Spain, during the period we have gone over, was full of the spirit of this class of fictions,—not only producing them in great numbers, and strongly marked with the popular character, but carrying their tone into the longer romances and upon the stage to a degree quite unknown elsewhere.[189]

The most striking circumstance, however, connected with the history of all romantic fiction in Spain,—whatever form it assumed,—is its early appearance, and its early decay. The story of “Amadis” filled the world with its fame, when no other Spanish prose romance of chivalry was heard of; and, what is singular, though the oldest of its class, it still remains the best-written in any language;—while, on the other hand, the[p. 119] book that overthrew this same Amadis, with all his chivalry, is the “Don Quixote”; again, the oldest and best of all similar works, and one that is still read and admired by thousands who know nothing of the shadowy multitudes it destroyed, except what its great author tells them. The “Conde Lucanor” appeared full half a century earlier than the “Decamerone.” The “Diana” of Montemayor soon eclipsed its Italian prototype in popularity, and, for a time, shone without a successful rival of its class throughout Europe. The picaresque stories, exclusively Spanish from the very first, and the multitudes of tales that followed them with attributes hardly less separate and national, never lose their Spanish air and costume, even in the most successful of their foreign imitations. Taken together, the number of these fictions is very great;—so great, that their mass may well be called enormous. But what is more remarkable than their multitude is the fact, that they were produced when the rest of Europe, with a partial exception in favor of Italy, was not yet awakened to corresponding efforts of the imagination; before Madame de Lafayette had published her “Zayde”; before Sidney’s “Arcadia” had appeared, or D’Urfé’s “Astrea,” or Corneille’s “Cid,” or Le Sage’s “Gil Blas.” In short, they were at the height of their fame, just at the period when the Hôtel de Rambouillet reigned supreme over the taste of France, and when Hardy, following the indications of the public will and the example of his rivals, could do no better than bring out upon the stage of Paris nearly every one of the tales of Cervantes, and many of those of Cervantes’s rivals and contemporaries.[190]

[p. 120]

But civilization and manners advanced in the rest of Europe rapidly from this moment, and paused in Spain. Madrid, instead of sending its influences to France, began itself to acknowledge the control of French literature and refinement. The creative spirit, therefore, ceased in Spanish romantic fiction, and, as we shall presently see, a spirit of French imitation took its place.

We shall hardly look for forensic or deliberative eloquence in Spain. The whole constitution of things there, the political and ecclesiastical institutions of the country, and, perhaps we should add, the very genius of the people, were unfriendly to the growth of a plant like this, which flourishes only in the soil of freedom.

The Spanish tribunals, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whether in the ordinary course of their administration of justice, or in the dark proceedings of the Inquisition, took less cognizance of the influences of eloquence than those of any other Christian country of modern times. They dealt with the wheel and the fagot,—not with the spirit of persuasion. Nor was this spirit truly known or favored in the political assemblies of the kingdom, though it was not supplanted there by the formidable instruments familiar in the courts of justice. In the ancient Cortes of Castile, and still more in those of Aragon, there may have been discussions which were raised by their fervor to something like what we now call deliberative eloquence. We have, in fact, intimations of such discussions in the old chronicles; especially in those that record the trou[p. 122]bles and violence of the great nobles in the reigns of John the Second and Henry the Fourth. But a free, living debate on a great political principle, or on the conduct of those who managed the affairs of the country,—such a debate as sometimes shook the popular assemblies of antiquity, and in modern times has often controlled the destinies of Christendom,—was, in Spain, a thing absolutely unknown.

Even the grave and dry discussions, to which the pressure of affairs gave rise, were rare and accidental. There was no training for them; and they could be followed by none of the great practical results that are at once the only sufficient motive and reward that can make them enter freely into the institutions of a state. Indeed, whatever there was of discussion in any open assembly could occur only in the earlier period of the monarchy, when the language and culture of the nation were still too little advanced to produce specimens of careful debate; for from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and the days of the Comunidades, the Cortes were gradually restrained in their privileges, until at last they ceased to be any thing but a part of the pageantry of the empire, and served only to record the laws they should themselves have discussed and modelled. From this period, all opportunity for the growth of political eloquence in Spain was lost. It would have been no more tolerated by one of the Philips than Lutheranism.

The eloquence of the pulpit was checked by similar causes, but in a different way. The Catholic religion has maintained in Spain, down to a late period, more than it has in any other country, the character it had during the Middle Ages. It has been to an extraordinary degree a religion of mysteries, of forms, and of[p. 123] penance;—a religion, therefore, in which such modes of moving the understanding and the heart as have prevailed in France and England since the middle of the seventeenth century have been rarely attempted, and never with great success.

If any exception is to be made to this remark, it must be made in the case of Luis de Leon and in that of Luis de Granada. Of the first we have already spoken. He printed, indeed, no sermons as such; but he inserted in his other works, and especially in his “Names of Christ” and in his “Perfect Wife,” long declamations, sometimes preceded by a text and sometimes not, but regularly divided into heads, and wearing the general appearance and attributes of religious discourses. These, since they were printed as early as 1584, may be accounted the earliest specimens of Spanish eloquence fitted for the pulpit, and, if not actually delivered, are still worthy of notice.[191]

The case of Luis de Granada is one more directly in point. That remarkable man was head of the Dominican order, or the order of the Preaching Monks, so that both his place and his profession led him to the cultivation of the eloquence of the pulpit. But, besides this, he seems to have devoted himself to it with the strong preference of genius, preaching extemporaneously, it is said, with great power and unction. In 1576, he published a Latin treatise on the subject of Pulpit Eloquence; and in 1595, after his death, his friends printed, in addition to those published during his lifetime, fourteen of his more formal discourses, in which he has been thought, not only to have given a full illustration[p. 124] of the precepts he inculcated, but to have placed himself at the head of the department of eloquence to which he devoted so much of his life.

They are in a bold and affluent style,—somewhat mystical, as were his own religious tendencies,—and often more declamatory than seems in keeping with the severe and solemn nature of their subjects; but they are written with remarkable purity of idiom, and breathe everywhere the spirit of the religion that was so deeply impressed on his age and country. Perhaps a more characteristic specimen of Spanish eloquence can hardly be found, than that in which Luis de Granada describes the resurrection of the Saviour; adding to it his descent into hell to rescue the souls of the righteous who were pining there because they had died before his great sacrifice was completed,—a doctrine of the Catholic Church capable of high poetical ornament, and one which, from the time of Dante, has been often set forth with the most solemn effect.

“On that glorious day,” exclaims Luis de Granada, in his sermon on the Resurrection, “the sun shone more brightly than on all others, serving its Lord in dutiful splendor amidst his rejoicings, as it had served him in darkness through his sufferings. The heavens, which had been veiled in mourning to hide his agonies, were now bright with redoubled glory as they saw him rise conquering from the grave. And who would not rejoice in such a day? The whole humanity of Christ rejoiced in it; all the disciples of Christ rejoiced in it; heaven rejoiced, earth rejoiced; hell itself shared in the general jubilee. For the triumphant Prince descended into its depths, clothed with splendor and might. The everlasting darkness grew bright before his steps; the eternal lamentations ceased; the realms of torment[p. 125] paused at his approach. The princes of Edom were disturbed, and the mighty men of Moab trembled, and they that dwelt in the land of Canaan were filled with fear. And the multitude of the suffering murmured and said, ‘Who is this mighty one, so resplendent, so powerful? Never before was his likeness seen in these realms of hell; never hath the tributary world sent such a one to these depths,—one who demands judgment, not a debtor; one who fills us with dread, not one guilty like ourselves; a judge, and not a culprit; a conqueror, not a sinner. Say, where were our watchmen and our guards, when he burst in victory on our barred gates? By what might has he entered? And who is he, that can do these things? If he were guilty, he were not thus bold; if the shade of sin lay on his soul, how could our darkness be made bright with his glory? If he be God, why should hell receive him? and if he be man, whence hath he this might? If he be God, why dwelt he in the grave? and if man, by what authority would he thus lay waste our abodes?’

“Thus murmured the vassals of hell, as the Conqueror entered in glory to free his chosen captives. For there stood they, all assembled together,—all the souls of the just, who from the foundation of the world till that day had passed through the gates of the grave; all the prophets and men of might who had glorified the Lord in the manifold agonies of martyrdom;—a glorious company!—a mighty treasure!—the richest inheritance of Christ’s triumph! For there stood the two original parents of the generations of mankind,—the first in sin and the first in faith and hope. There stood that aged saint who rescued in the ark of safety those that repeopled the world when the waters of the deluge were spent. There stood the father of the faithful,[p. 126] who first received by merit the revelation of God’s will, and wore, in his person, the marks of his election. There stood his obedient son, who, bearing on his shoulders the wood of his own sacrifice, showed forth the redemption of the world. There stood the holy progenitor of the Twelve Tribes, who, winning his father’s blessing in the stranger guise of another’s garb, set forth the mystery of the humanity and incarnation of the Divine Word. There stood, also, as it were, guests newly arrived in that strange land, the Holy Baptist and the blessed Simeon, who prayed that he might not be taken from the earth till with his own eyes he had seen its salvation; who received it in his arms, and sang gently its canticle of peace. And there, too, found a place the poor Lazarus of the Gospel, who, for the patience with which he bore his wounds, deserved to join so noble a company, and share its longing hopes. And all this multitude of sanctified spirits stood there mourning and grieving for this day; and in the midst of them all, and as the leader of them all, the holy king and prophet repeated without ceasing his ancient lamentation: ‘As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God! My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?’ O blessed and holy king, if this be the cause of thy lamentation, let it cease for ever; for behold thy God! behold thy Saviour! Change, then, thy chant, and sing as thou wast wont to sing of old: ‘Lord, thou hast been favorable unto thy land; thou hast pardoned the offences of thy people; thou hast hidden thy face from the multitude of their sins.’”[192]

[p. 127]

It would not be easy to select a more striking example than this of the peculiar rhetoric that was most sought in the Spanish pulpit. But the portions of equal merit are few, and the amount of the whole is small. After the beginning of the seventeenth century, the affected style of Góngora and the conceits of the school of Ledesma found their way into the churches generally, and especially into the churches of Madrid. This was natural. No persons depended more on the voice of fashion than the preachers of the court and the capital, and the fashion of both was thoroughly infected with the new doctrines. Paravicino, at this period, was at the head of the popular preachers; himself a poet devoted to the affectations of Góngora; a man of wit, a gentleman, and a courtier. From 1616 he was, during twenty years, pulpit orator to Philip the Third and Philip the Fourth, and enjoyed, as such, a kind and degree of popularity before unknown. As might have been expected, he had many followers, each of whom sought to have a fashionable audience. Such audiences were soon systematically provided. They were, in fact, collected, arranged, and seated by the friends and admirers of the preacher himself,—generally by those who, from their ecclesiastical relations, had an interest in his success; and then the crowds thus gathered were induced in different ways to express their approbation of the more elaborate passages in his discourse. From this time, and in this way, religious dignity disappeared from the Spanish pulpit, and whatever there was of value in its eloquence was confined to two forms,—the learned[p. 128] discussions, often in Latin, addressed to bodies of ecclesiastics, and the extemporaneous exhortations addressed to the lower classes;—the latter popular and vehement in their tone, and, by their coarseness, generally unworthy of the solemn subjects they touched.[193]

There is little in Spanish epistolary correspondence that requires notice as a portion of the elegant literature of the country. The heartiness of a simpler age gives, indeed, a charm to such letters as those which claim to have been written by Cibdareal, and in a less degree to those of Pulgar and Diego de Valera. Later, the despatches of Columbus, in which he made known to the world his vast discoveries, are occasionally marked by the fervor of an enthusiasm inspired by his great subject; and those of his queen and patron, though few in number and less interesting, are quite as characteristic and quite as true-hearted.

But, with the stately court brought from the North by Charles the Fifth, all this was changed. Added forms, and more than the old national gravity, passed into the intercourse of social life, and infected the style of the commonest correspondence. Genial familiarity disappeared from the letters of friends, and even private affections and feelings were either seldom expressed, or were so covered up as to be with difficulty recognized.[p. 129] Thus, what was most valued in this department at the time, and for a century afterwards, were Guevara’s “Golden Epistles,” which are only formal dissertations, and the “Epistles” of Avila, which are sermons in disguise, that moved the hearts of his countrymen because they were such earnest exhortations to a religious life.[194]

From these remarks, however, we should except portions of the correspondence of Zurita, the historian, extending over the last thirty years of his life, and ending in 1582, just before his death. They give us the business-like intercourse of a man of letters, carried on with all classes of society, from ministers of state and the highest ecclesiastics of the realm down to persons distinguished only because they were occupied in studies like his own. The number of letters in this collection is large, amounting to above two hundred. More of them are from Antonio Agustin, Archbishop of Tarragona, an eminent scholar in Spanish history and civil law, than from any other person; but the most interesting are from Zurita himself, from his friend Ambrosio Morales, from Diego de Mendoza, the historian, Argote de Molina, the antiquarian, and Fernan Nuñez, the Greek Commander. Each of these series is marked by something characteristic of its author, and all of them, taken together, show more familiarly the interior condition of a scholar’s life in Spain, in the sixteenth century, than it can be found anywhere else.[195]

[p. 130]

But the principal exception to be made in favor of Spanish epistolary correspondence is found in the case of Antonio Perez, secretary of Philip the Second, and for some time his favorite minister. His father, who was a scholar, and made a translation of the “Odyssey,”[196] had been in the employment of Charles the Fifth, so that the younger Perez inherited somewhat of the court influence which was then so important; but his rapid advancement was owing to his own genius, and to a love of intrigue and adventure, which seemed to be a part of his nature. At last, in 1578, at the command of his master, he not unwillingly brought about the murder of Escovedo, a person high in the confidence of Don John of Austria, whose growing influence it was thought worth while thus to curtail;—a crime which, perpetrated as it was in consequence of the official connection of the secretary with the monarch, brought Perez to the very height of his favor.

But it was not long before the guilty agent became as unwelcome to his guilty master as their victim had been. A change in their relations followed, cautiously brought on by the unscrupulous king, but deep and entire. At first, Philip permitted Perez to be pursued by the kinsmen of the murdered man, and afterwards, contriving plausible pretexts for hiding his motives, began himself to join in the persecution. Eleven long years[p. 131] the wretched courtier was watched, vexed, and imprisoned, at Madrid; and once, at least, he was subjected to cruel bodily tortures. When he could endure this no longer, he fled to Aragon, his native kingdom, whose freer political constitution did not permit him to be crushed in secret. This was a great surprise to Philip, and, for an instant, seems to have disconcerted his dark schemes. But his resources were equal to the emergency. He pursued Perez to Saragossa, and finding the regular means of justice unequal to the demands of his vengeance, caused his victim to be seized by the Inquisition, under the absurd charge of heresy. But this, again, in the form in which Philip found it necessary to proceed, was a violation of the ancient privileges of the kingdom, and the people broke out into open rebellion, and released Perez from prison;—a consequence of his measures, which, perhaps, was neither unforeseen by Philip nor unwelcome to him. At any rate, he immediately sent an army into Aragon, sufficient, not only to overwhelm all open resistance, but to strike a terror that should prevent future opposition to his will; and the result, besides a vast number of rich confiscations to the royal treasury, was the condemnation of sixty-eight persons of distinction to death by the Inquisition, and the final overthrow of nearly every thing that remained of the long-cherished liberties of the country.

Meantime, Perez escaped secretly from Saragossa, as he had before escaped from Madrid, and, wandering over the Pyrenees in the disguise of a shepherd, sought refuge in Bearn, at the little court of Catherine of Bourbon, sister of Henry the Fourth. Public policy caused him to be well received both there and in France, where he afterwards passed the greater part of his long exile. During the troubles between Elizabeth[p. 132] and Philip, he instinctively went to England, and, while there, was much with Essex, and became more familiar with Bacon than the wise and pious mother of the future chancellor thought it well one so profligate as Perez should be. Philip, who could ill endure the idea of having such a witness of his crimes intriguing at the courts of his great enemies, endeavoured to have Perez assassinated both in Paris and London, and failed more from accident than from want of well-concerted plans to accomplish his object.

At last peace came between France and England on one side, and Spain on the other; and Perez ceased to be a person of consequence to those who had so long used him. Henry the Fourth, indeed, with his customary good nature, still indulged him even in very extravagant modes of life, which rather resembled those of a prince than of an exile. But his claims were so unreasonable, and were urged with such boldness and pertinacity, that every body wearied of him. He therefore fell into unhonored poverty, and dragged out the miserable life of a neglected courtier till 1611, when he died at Paris. Four years later, the Inquisition, which had caused him to be burnt in effigy as a heretic, reluctantly did him the imperfect justice of removing their anathemas from his memory, and thus permitted his children to enter into civil rights, of which nothing but the most shameless violence had ever deprived them.

From the time of his first imprisonment, Perez began to write the letters that are still extant; and their series never stops, till we approach the period of his death. Some of them are to his wife and children; others, to Gil de Mesa, his confidential friend and agent; and others, to persons high in place, from whose influence he hoped to gain favor. His Narratives, or “Re[p. 133]lations,” as he calls them, and his “Memorial” on his own case, occasionally involve other letters, and are themselves in the nature of long epistles, written with great talent and still greater ingenuity, to gain the favor of his judges or of the world. All these, some of which his position forbade him ever to send to the persons to whom they were addressed, he carefully preserved, and during his exile published them from time to time to suit his own political purposes;—at first anonymously, or under the assumed name of Raphael Peregrino; afterwards under the seeming editorship of his friend Mesa; and finally, without disguise of any sort, dedicating some of them to Henry the Fourth, and some to the Pope.

Their number is large, amounting in the most ample collection to above a thousand pages. The best are those that are most familiar; for even in the slightest of them, as when he is sending a present of gloves to Lady Rich, or a few new-fashioned toothpicks to the Duke of Mayenne, there is a nice preservation of the Castilian proprieties of expression. Many of them sparkle with genius; sometimes most unexpectedly, though not always in good taste; Thus, to his innocent wife, shamefully kept in prison during his exile, he says: “Though you are not allowed to write to me, or to enjoy what to the absent is the breath of life; yet here [in France] there is no punishment for the promptings of natural affection. I answer, therefore, what I hear in the spirit, your complaints of the punishment laid on your own virtues and on the innocence of your children,—complaints, which reach me from that asylum of darkness and of the shadow of death, in which you now lie. But when I listen, it seems as if I ought to hear you no less with my outward ears, just as the[p. 134] words and cries that come from the caves under the earth only resound the louder, as they are rolled up to us from their dark hiding-places.”[197] And again, when speaking of the cruel conduct of his judges to his family, he breaks out: “But let them not be deceived. Their victims may be imprisoned and loaded with irons; but they have the two mightiest advocates of the earth to defend them,—their innocence and their wrongs. For neither could Cicero nor Demosthenes so pierce the ears of men, nor so stir up their minds, nor so shake the frame of things, as can these two, to whom God has given the especial privilege to stand for ever in his presence, to cry for justice, and to be witnesses and advocates for one another in whatsoever he has reserved for his own awful judgment.”[198]

The letters of Perez are in a great variety of styles, from the cautious and yet fervent appeals that he made to Philip the Second, down to the gallant notes he wrote to court ladies, and the overflowings of his heart to his young children. But they are all written in remarkably idiomatic Castilian, and are rendered interesting from the circumstance, that in each class there is a strict observance of such conventional forms as were required by the relative social positions of the author and his correspondents.[199]

[p. 135]

The letters of Santa Teresa, who was a contemporary of the secretary of Philip the Second, and died in 1582, are entirely different; for while nothing can be more practical and worldly than those of Perez, the letters of the devout nun are entirely spiritual. She believed herself to be inspired, and therefore wrote with an air of authority, which is almost always solemn and imposing, but which sometimes, through its very boldness and freedom from all restraint, becomes easy and graceful. Her talents were versatile and her perceptions acute. To each of her many correspondents she says something that seems suited to the occasion on which she is consulted;—a task not easy for a nun, who lived forty-seven years in retirement from the world, and during that time was called upon to give advice to archbishops and bishops, to wise and able statesmen like Diego de Mendoza, to men of genius like Luis de Granada, to persons in private life who were in deep affliction or in great danger, and to women in the ordinary course of their daily lives. Her letters fill four volumes, and though, in general, they are only to be regarded as fervent exhortations or religious teachings, still, by the[p. 136] purity, beauty, and womanly grace of their style, they may fairly claim a distinguished place in the epistolary literature of her country.[200]

Some portions of the correspondence of Bartolomé de Argensola about 1625, of Lope de Vega before 1630, and of Quevedo a little later, have been preserved to us; but they are too inconsiderable in amount to have much value. Of Cascales, the rhetorician, we have more. In 1634, he printed three Decades of Letters; but they are almost entirely devoted to discussions of points that involve learned lore; and, even where they are not such, they are stiff and formal. A few by Nicolas Antonio, the literary historian, who died in 1684, are plain and business-like, but are written in a hard style, that prevents them from being interesting. Those of Solís, who closes up the century and the period, are better. They are such as belong to the intercourse of an old man, left to struggle through the last years of a long life with poverty and misfortune, and express the feelings becoming his situation, both with philosophical calmness and Christian resignation.[201]

[p. 137]

But no writer in the history of Spanish epistolary correspondence can be compared for acuteness and brilliancy with Antonio Perez, or for eloquence with Santa Teresa.

The fathers of Spanish history, as distinguished from Spanish chronicling, are Zurita and Morales, both of whom, educated in the reign of Charles the Fifth, show that they were not insensible to the influences of that great period in the annals of their country, and both of whom, after its close, prepared and published their works under the happiest auspices.

Zurita was born in Saragossa in 1512, and died there in 1580; so that he had the happiness to live while the political privileges of his native kingdom were yet little impaired, and to die just before they were effectually broken down. His father was a favored physician of Ferdinand the Catholic, and accompanied that monarch to Naples in 1506. The son, who showed from early youth a great facility in the acquisition of knowledge, was educated at the University of Alcalá, where it was his good fortune to have, for his chief instructor, Fernan Nuñez, who was commonly called the Greek Commander, from the circumstance, that, while his position in the state as a member of the great family of the Guzmans made him Knight Commander of the Order of Santiago, his personal acquisitions and[p. 139] talents rendered him the first Greek scholar of his age and country.

As the elder Zurita continued to be much trusted by Charles the Fifth, and as his son’s connections were chiefly with persons of great consideration, the progress of the future historian was, at first, rather in the direction of public affairs. But in 1548, under circumstances peculiarly honorable to him, he was appointed historiographer of Aragon; being elected unanimously by the free Cortes of the kingdom to the office, which they had just established, and as a candidate for which he had to encounter the most powerful and learned competitors. The election seems to have satisfied his ambition, and to have given a new direction to his life. At any rate, he immediately procured a royal warrant to examine and use all documents needful for his purpose that could be found in any part of the empire. Under this broad authority he went over much of Spain, consulting and arranging the great national records at Simancas, and then visited Sicily and Naples, from whose monasteries and public archives he obtained further ample and learned spoils.

The result was, that between 1562 and 1580 he published, in six folio volumes, “The Annals of Aragon,” from the invasion of the country by the Arabs to 1516, the last third of his labor being entirely given to the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic, for which the recollections of his father’s life at the court of that monarch probably afforded some of the more interesting materials. The whole work is more important for Spanish history than any that had preceded it. It has hardly any thing of the monkish credulity of the old chronicles, for Zurita was a man of the world, and always concerned in the stirring interests of his time; first, from having[p. 140] been intrusted with the municipal affairs of one of the principal cities of the kingdom; next, from being charged with the general correspondence of the Inquisition; and finally, from his duties as one of the secretaries of Philip the Second, which kept him much at court and about the king’s person. It shows, too, not unfrequently, a love for the ancient privileges of Aragon, and a generosity of opinion on political subjects, remarkable in one who was aware that whatever he wrote would not only be submitted before its publication to the censorship of jealous rivals, but read by the wary and severe monarch on whom all his fortunes depended. Its faults are its great length and a carelessness of style, scarcely regarded as faults at the time when it was written.[202]

[p. 141]

Morales, who was an admirer of Zurita, and defended him from one of his assailants in a tract published at the end of the last volume of the “Annals of Aragon,” was born in 1513, a year after his friend, and died in 1591, having survived him by eleven years. He was educated at Salamanca, and, besides early obtaining Church preferments and distinctions, rose subsequently to eminence as a Professor in the University of Alcalá. But from 1570, when he was appointed historiographer to the crown of Castile, he devoted himself to the completion of the History begun on so vast a scale by Ocampo, whose work he seems to have taken up in some degree out of regard for the memory of its author.

He began his task, however, too late. He was already sixty-seven years old, and when he died, eleven years afterwards, he had been able to bring it down no further than to the union of the crowns of Castile and Leon, in 1037,—a point from which it was afterwards carried, by Sandoval, to the death of Alfonso the Seventh, in 1097, where it finally stops. Imperfect, however, as is the portion compiled in his old age by Morales, we can hardly fail to regard it, not, indeed, as so wise and well-weighed an historical composition as that of Zurita, but as one marked with much more general ability, and showing a much more enlightened spirit, than the work of Ocampo, to which it serves as a continuation. Its style, unhappily, is wanting in correctness;—a circumstance the more to be noticed, since Morales valued himself on his pure Castilian, both as the son of a gentleman of high caste, and as the nephew of Fernan de Oliva, by whom he was educated, and whose works he had published because they had done so much to advance prose composition in Spain.[203]

[p. 142]

Contemporary with both Zurita and Morales, but far in advance of both of them as a writer of history, was the old statesman, Diego de Mendoza, whose fresh and vigorous account of the rebellion of the Moors in 1568 we have already considered, noticing it rather at the period when it was written than at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when it was first given to the world, and when Siguenza, Ribadeneyra, Mariana, Sandoval, and Herrera had already appeared, and determined the character which should be finally impressed on this department of Spanish literature.

Of this group, the first two, who devoted themselves to ecclesiastical history, and entered into the religious discussions of their time, were, perhaps, originally the most prominent. Ribadeneyra, one of the early and efficient members of the Society of Jesuits, distinguished himself by his “History of the Schism in the English Church,” in the time of Henry the Eighth, and by his “Lives of the Saints.” Siguenza, who was a disciple of Saint Jerome, was no less faithful to the brotherhood[p. 143] by whom he was adopted and honored, as his life of their founder and his history of their Order abundantly prove. Both were men of uncommon gifts, and wrote with a manly and noble eloquence; the first with more richness and fervor, the last with a more simple dignity, but each with the earnest and trusting spirit of his peculiar faith.[204]

From the nature of their subjects, however, neither of them rose to be the great historian of his country;—an honor which belongs to Juan de Mariana, a foundling, who was born at Talavera in 1536, and whose extraordinary talents attracted the attention of the Jesuits, then fast advancing into notice as a religious power. Having gone through a severe course of studies at Alcalá, he was selected, at the age of twenty-four, to fill the most important place in the great college which the members of his society were then establishing at Rome, and which they regarded as one of their principal institutions for consolidating and extending their influence. After five years, he was removed to Sicily,[p. 144] to introduce similar studies into that island; and, a little later, he was transferred to Paris, where he was received with honor, and taught for several years, lecturing chiefly on the works and opinions of Thomas Aquinas, to crowded audiences. But the climate of France was unfriendly to his health, and in 1574, having spent thirteen years in foreign countries, as a public instructor, he returned to Spain, and established himself in the house of his order at Toledo, which he hardly left during the forty-nine remaining years of his life.

This long period, which he devoted to literary labor, was not, however, permitted to be as peaceful as his merits should have made it. The Polyglot Bible published by Arias Montano at Antwerp, in 1569-72,—which was at first received with great favor, but afterwards, by the intrigues of the Jesuits, was denounced to the Inquisition,—excited so bitter a quarrel, that it was deemed necessary to inquire into the truth of the charges brought against it. By the management of the Jesuits, Mariana was the principal person employed to make the investigation; and, through his learning and influence, they felt sure of a triumph. But though he was a faithful Jesuit, he was not a subservient one. His decision was in favor of Montano; and this, together with the circumstance that he did not follow the intimations given to him when he was employed in arranging the Index Expurgatorius of 1584, brought upon him the displeasure of his superiors in a way that caused him much trouble.[205]

In 1599, he published a Latin treatise on the Institu[p. 145]tion of Royalty, and dedicated it to Philip the Third;—a work liberal in its general political tone, and even intimating that there are cases in which it may be lawful to put a monarch to death. At home, it caused little remark. It was regularly approved by the censors of the press, and is even said to have been favored by the policy of the government, which, in the time of Philip the Second, had sent assassins to cut off Elizabeth of England and the Prince of Orange. But in France, where Henry the Third had been thus put to death a few years before, and where Henry the Fourth suffered a similar fate a few years afterwards, it excited a great sensation. Indeed, the sixth chapter of the first book directly mentions, and by implication countenances, the murder of the former of these monarchs, and was claimed, though contrary to the truth of fact, to have been among the causes that stimulated Ravaillac to the assassination of the latter. It was, therefore, both attacked and defended with extraordinary acrimony; and at last the Parliament of Paris ordered it to be burned by the hands of the common hangman. What was more unfortunate for its author, the whole discussion having brought much popular odium on the Jesuits, who were held responsible for a book which was written by one of their order, and could not have been published without permission of its heads, Mariana himself became more than ever unwelcome to the great body of his religious associates.[206]

[p. 146]

At last, an occasion was found where he could be assailed without assigning the reasons for the attack. In 1609, he published, not in Spain, but at Cologne, seven Latin treatises on various subjects of theology and criticism, such as the state of the Spanish theatre, the Arab computation of time, and the year and day of the Saviour’s birth. Most of them were of a nature that could provoke no animadversion; but one, “On Mortality and Immortality,” was seized upon for theological censure, and another, “On the Coinage of the Realm,” was assailed on political grounds, because it showed how unwise and scandalous had been the practices of the reigning favorite, the Duke of Lerma, in tampering with the currency and debasing it. The Inquisition took cognizance of both; and their author, though then seventy-three years old, was subjected first to confinement, and afterwards to penance, for his offences. Both works were placed at once on the Index Expurgatorius; and Philip the Third gave orders to collect and destroy as many copies as possible of the volume in which they were contained. As Lope de Vega said, “His country did not pardon the most learned Mariana when he erred.”

His treatment on this occasion was undoubtedly the more severe, because among his papers was found a treatise “On the Errors in the Government of the Society of Jesuits,” which was not printed till after its author’s death, and then with no friendly views to the order.[207] But the firm spirit of Mariana was not broken[p. 147] by his persecutions. He went forward with his literary labors to the last; and when he died, in 1623, it was of the infirmities which his extreme age had naturally brought with it. He was eighty-seven years old.

The main occupation of the last thirty or forty years of his life was his great History. In the foreign countries where he had long lived, the earlier annals of Spain were so little known to the learned men with whom he had been associated, that, as a Spaniard, he had felt mortified by an ignorance which seemed disrespectful to his country. He determined, therefore, to do something that should show the world by what manly steps Spain had come into the larger interests of Europe, and to prove by her history that she deserved the consideration she had, from the time of Charles the Fifth, everywhere enjoyed. He began his work, therefore, in Latin, that all Christendom might be able to read it, and in 1592 published, in that language, twenty out of thirty of the books, of which it consists.

But, even before he had printed the other ten books, which appeared in 1609, he was fortunately induced, like Cardinal Bembo, to become his own translator, and to give his work to his countrymen in the pure Castilian of Toledo. In doing this, he enjoyed a great advantage.[p. 148] He might use a freedom in his version that could be claimed by no one else; for he had not only a right to change the phraseology and arrangement, but, whenever he saw fit, he might modify the opinions of a book which was as much his own in the one language as in the other. His “Historia de España,” therefore, the first part of which appeared in 1601, has all the air and merit of an original work; and in the successive editions published under his own direction, and especially in the fourth, which appeared the very year of his death, it was gradually enlarged, enriched, and in every way improved, until it became, what it has remained ever since, the proudest monument erected to the history of his country.[208]

It begins with the supposed peopling of Spain by Tubal, the son of Japhet, and comes down to the death of Ferdinand the Catholic and the accession of Charles the Fifth; to all which Mariana himself afterwards added a compressed abstract of the course of events to 1621, when Philip the Fourth ascended the throne. It was a bold undertaking, and in some respects is marked with the peculiar spirit of its age. In weighing the value of authorities, for instance, he has been less careful than became the high office he had assumed. He follows Ocampo, and especially Garibay,—credulous compilers of old fables, who were his own contemporaries,—confessing freely that he thought it safest and best to take the received traditions of the country, unless obvious reasons called upon him to reject them.[p. 149] His manner, too, is, in a few particulars, open to remark. In the beautiful dedication of the Spanish version of his History to Philip the Third, he admits that antiquated words occasionally adhere to his style, from his familiar study of the old writers; and Saavedra, who was pleased to find fault with him, says, that, as other people dye their beards to make themselves look young, Mariana dyed his to make himself look old.[209]

But there is another side to all this. His willing belief in the old chronicles, tempered, as it necessarily is, by his great learning, gives an air of true-heartedness and good faith to his accounts, and a picturesqueness to his details, which are singularly attractive; while, at the same time, his occasional antiquated words and phrases, so well suited to such views of his subject, add to the idiomatic richness, in which, among Spanish prose compositions, the style of Mariana is all but unrivalled. His narratives—the most important part of an historical work of this class—are peculiarly flowing, free, and impressive. The accounts of the wars of Hannibal, in the second book; those of the irruption of the Northern nations, with which the fifth opens; the conspiracy of John de Procida, in the fourteenth; the last scenes in the troubled life of Peter the Cruel, in the seventeenth; and most of the descriptions of the leading events in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella,[p. 150] towards the conclusion of the work, give abundant proof of this peculiar historical talent. They seem instinct with life and movement.

His formal speeches, in which he made Livy his model, are, generally, less fortunate. Most of them want individuality and appropriateness. But the one which in the fifth book he has given to Ruy Lope Davalos, when that nobleman offers the crown of Castile to the Infante Don Ferdinand, is remarkable for the courageous spirit in which it discusses the foundations of all political government, and leaves the rights of kings to rest on the assent of their subjects;—a boldness, it should be added, which is apparent in many other parts of his history, as it was in much of his life.

The characters he has drawn of the prominent personages that, from time to time, come to the front of the stage, are almost always short, sketched with a few touches, and struck off with the hand of a master. Such are those of Alvaro de Luna, Alfonso the Wise, and the unhappy Prince of Viana, in which so few words could hardly be made to express more.

As a general remark, a certain nobleness of air and carriage, not, perhaps, without something of the old Castilian sturdiness, but never without its dignity, is the characteristic that most prevails throughout the whole work; and this, with its admirably idiomatic style,—so full, yet so unencumbered, so pure and yet so rich,—renders it, if not the most trustworthy of annals, at least the most remarkable union of picturesque chronicling with sober history, that the world has ever seen.[210]

[p. 151]

Sandoval, who was one of the salaried chroniclers of the monarchy, and who, in that capacity, prepared the continuation of Morales, already noticed, seems to have been willing to constitute himself the successor of Mariana, and prosecute the general history of Spain where that eloquent Jesuit was likely to leave it, rather than from the point where he had himself officially taken it up. At least he began there, and wrote an elaborate life of Charles the Fifth. But it is too long. It fills as many pages as the entire work of Mariana, and, though written with simplicity, is not attractive in its style. His prejudices are strong and obvious. Not only the monk,—for he was a Benedictine, and enjoyed successively two very rich bishoprics,—but the courtier of Philip the Third, is constantly apparent. He lays the whole crime of the assault and capture of Rome upon the Constable de Bourbon; and, besides tracing the Austrian family distinctly to Adam, he connects its honors genealogically with those of Hercules and Dardanus. Still, the History of Sandoval is a documentary work of authority much relied on by Robertson, and one that, on the whole, by its ample and minute details, gives a more satisfactory account of the reign of Charles the Fifth than any other single history extant. It was first published in 1604-6, and its author died at the end of 1620 or the beginning of 1621.[211]

[p. 152]

After this, no important and connected work on the history of Spain, that falls within the domain of elegant literature, appeared for a long period.[212] Portions of[p. 153] Spanish history, and portions of the history of Spanish discovery and conquest in the East and the West, were indeed published from time to time, but the official chroniclers of the crowns of Castile and Aragon no longer felt themselves bound to go on with the great works of their predecessors, and the decaying spirit of the monarchy made no earnest demands on others to tread in their steps. Some, however, of these historians of the outposts of an empire which now extended round the globe, and some of the accounts of isolated events in its annals at home, should be noticed.

Of this class, the first in importance and the most comprehensive in character is “The General History of the Indies,” by Antonio de Herrera. It embraces the period from the first discovery of America to the year 1554; and as Herrera was a practised writer, and, from his official position as historiographer to the Indies, had access to every source of information known in his time, his work, which was printed in 1601, is of great value. But he was the author of other historical works, for[p. 154] which his qualifications and resources were less satisfactory and his prejudices more abundant;—such as a “History of the World during the Reign of Philip the Second,” a History of the affairs of England and Scotland, during the unhappy times of Mary Stuart; a History of the League in France; and a History of the affair of Antonio Perez and the troubles that followed it;—all written under the influence of contemporary passions, and all published between 1589 and 1612, before any of these passions had been much tranquillized.

It is sufficient to say of them, that, in the case of Antonio Perez, Herrera suppresses nearly every one of the important facts that tend to the justification of that remarkable man; and that, by way of a glorious termination to his Universal History, he gives Philip the Second, in his death-struggles, miraculous assistance from heaven, to enable him to end his long and holy life by an act of devotion. Herrera’s chief reputation, therefore, as an historian, must rest upon his great work on the Discovery and Conquest of America, in which, indeed, his style, nowhere rich or powerful, seems better and more effective than it is in his other attempts at historical composition. He died in 1625, above seventy-six years old, much valued by Philip the Fourth, as he had been by that monarch’s father and grandfather.[213]

But the East, as well as the West, was now opened to Spanish adventure. The conquest of Portugal had[p. 155] brought the Oriental dependencies of that kingdom under the authority of the Spanish crown; and as the Count de Lemos, the great patron of letters in his time, and President of the Council of the Indies, chanced to have his attention particularly drawn in that direction, he commanded the younger of the Argensolas to write an account of the Moluccas. The poet obeyed, and published his work in 1609, dedicating it to Philip the Third. It is one of the most pleasing of the minor Spanish histories; full of the traditions found among the natives by the Portuguese, when they first landed, and of the wild adventures that followed when they had taken possession of the islands. Parts of it are, indeed, inconsistent with the nature of the civilization they found there, such as formal and eloquent harangues attributed to the natives; while other parts, like some of its love-stories, are romantic enough to be suspected of invention, even if they are true. But, in general, the work is written in an agreeable poetical style, such as is not unbefitting an account of the mysterious isles

striving, for a long time, to hide from the competition of other nations the history and resources of the oppressed race whom they compelled to minister to their love of gain.[214]

Quite as uncertain in authority and less elegant in style are the histories of Garcilasso de la Vega,—a gentle and trusting spirit rather than a wise one; proud[p. 156] of being a captain in the service of the king of Spain, and allied, as a son of one of the unscrupulous conquerors of Peru, to the great house of Infantado; but always betraying the weaker nature of his mother, who was of the blood royal of the Incas, and never entirely forgetting the glories of his Indian race, or the cruel injuries they had suffered at the hands of Spain. He was born at “Cuzco, in Peru, the seat of Atabalipa,” in 1540, and was educated there, amidst the tumults of the conquest; but, when he was twenty years old, he was sent to Spain, where, under difficult and trying circumstances, he maintained an honorable reputation during a life protracted to the age of seventy-six.

The military part of his personal history, which consisted of service under Don John of Austria against the Moriscos of Granada, was not of much consequence, though he seems to have valued himself upon it not a little. The part he gave to letters was more interesting and important. This portion he began, in 1590, with a translation of the “Dialogues on Love,” by Abarbanel, a Platonizing Jew, whose family had been expelled from Spain in the persecution under Ferdinand and Isabella, and who in Italy had published this singular work under the name of “The Hebrew Lion.” The attempt, so far as Garcilasso was concerned, was not a fortunate one. The Dialogues, which enjoyed considerable popularity at the time, had been already printed in Spanish,—a fact evidently unknown to him; and though, as it appears from a subsequent statement by himself, he had obtained for his translation the favorable regard of Philip the Second, still there was an odor both of Judaism and heathen free-thinking about it, that rendered it obnoxious to the ecclesiastical authorities of the state. Garcilasso’s first work, therefore, was speedily placed[p. 157] on the Index Expurgatorius, and was rarely heard of afterwards.

His next attempt was on a subject in which he had a nearer interest. It was a “History of Florida,” or rather of the first discovery of that country, and was published in 1605,—a work which, when, twenty years before, he spoke of writing it, he appropriately called “The Expedition of Fernando de Soto”; since the adventures of that extraordinary man, and his strange fate, not only form its most brilliant and attractive portion, but constitute nearly the whole of its substance. In this Garcilasso was more successful than he was in his version from the Italian; and his “History of Florida,” as it is still called, has been often reprinted since.

But, in his old age, his heart turned more and more to the thoughts and feelings of his youth, and, gathering together the few materials he could collect from among his kinsmen on the Pacific, as well as from the stores of his own memory and the records already accumulated in Spain, he published, in 1609, the first part of his “Commentaries on Peru”; the second of which, though licensed for the press in 1613, did not appear till 1617, the year after its author’s death. It is a garrulous, gossiping book, written in a diffuse style, and abounding in matters personal to himself. In its very division, he acknowledges frankly the conflicting claims that he felt were upon him. The earlier half, he says, relates to the eighteen Incas known to Peruvian history, and contains an account of the traditions of the country, its institutions, manners, and general character; all which he offers as a tribute due to his descent from the Children of the Sun. The remainder—which, with many episodes and much irrelevant, but not always unpleasant, discussion, contains the history of the Span[p. 158]ish conquest, and of the quarrels of the Spaniards with each other growing out of it—he offers, in like manner, to the glories of the great Spanish family with which he was connected, and which numbered on its rolls some of the brightest names in the Castilian annals. In both parts, his Commentaries are a striking and interesting book, showing much of the spirit of the old chronicles, and infected with even more than the common measure of chronicling credulity; since, with a natural willingness to believe whatever fables were honorable to the land of his birth, he mingles a constant anxiety to show that he is, above every thing else, a Catholic Christian, whose faith was much too ample to reject the most extravagant legends of his Church, and too pure to tolerate the idolatry of that royal ancestry which he yet cannot help regarding with reverence and admiration.[215]

The publication, in 1610, of “The War of Granada,” by Mendoza, had—as might have been anticipated from its attractive subject and style—an effect on Spanish historical composition; producing, in the course of the[p. 159] century, several imitations more worthy of notice than any thing in their class that appeared after the great work of Mariana.

The first of them is by Moncada, a nobleman of the highest rank in the South of Spain, and connected with several of the principal families, both in Catalonia and Valencia. His father was, successively, viceroy of Sardinia and Aragon; he himself was governor of the Low Countries and commander-in-chief of the armies there; and both of them filled, in their respective times, the most important of the Spanish embassies. But the younger Moncada had tastes widely different from the cares that beset his life. In 1623 he published his “Expedition of the Catalans against the Turks and Greeks”; and when he died, in 1635, just after putting to rout two hostile armies, he left several other works, of less value, one or two of which have since been printed. The History of the Catalan Expedition, by which alone he has been known in later times, is on the romantic adventures and achievements of an extraordinary band of mercenaries, who, under Roger de Flor,—successively a freebooter, a great admiral, and a Cæsar of the Eastern Empire,—drove back the Turks, as they approached the Bosphorus in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and then, after being for some time no less formidable to their allies than they had been to the infidel, settled down into a sort of uneasy tranquillity at Athens, where their historian leaves them.

It is an account, therefore, of a most wild passage in the affairs rather of the Middle Ages than of the Spanish peninsula,—one that may be trusted, notwithstanding its air of romance, since its foundations are laid in the great work of Zurita, and one by no means wanting in picturesque effect, since its details are often taken[p. 160] from Ramon Muntaner, the old Catalan, who had himself shared the perils of this very expedition, and described them in his own Chronicle with his accustomed spirit and vigor. Parts of it are very striking in themselves, and strikingly told; especially the rise of Roger de Flor till he had reached the highest place a subject could hold in the Greek empire, and then his assassination in the presence and by the command of the same Emperor who had raised him so high,—his blood soiling the imperial table, to which, with treacherous hospitality, he had been invited. The whole is written in a bold and free, rather than in a careful style; but the coloring is well suited to the dark ground-work of the picture, and, though less energetic in its tone than Mendoza’s “War of Granada,” of which, from the first sentence, we see it is an imitation, it is often more easy, flowing, and natural.[216]

Another military history written by a nobleman connected with the service of his country, both in its armies and its diplomacy, is to be found in an account of eleven campaigns in Flanders by Coloma, Marquis of Espinar, published in 1625. A translation which he made of the “Annals” of Tacitus has been regarded as the best in the language; but, in his own work, he shows no tendency to imitate the ancients. On the contrary, it is, as it were, fresh from the fields of the author’s glory, and full of the honorable feelings of a soldier, sketching the adventures of the army when in camp, when in immediate action, and when in winter-quarters; and adding to[p. 161] his main narrative occasional glimpses of the negotiations then going on in the Low Countries respecting Spanish affairs, and of the intrigues of the courtiers at Madrid round the death-bed of Philip the Second. The style of Coloma is unequal; but much of what he describes he had seen, and the rest had passed within the compass of what he deemed sure information; so that he speaks, not only with authority, but with the natural vivacity which comes from being so near the events he records, that their color is imparted to his language.[217]

To the same class with the last belongs the spirited history of a portion of the Catalan rebellion in the time of Philip the Fourth. It was written by Melo, a Portuguese gentleman, who remained attached to the service of Spain till 1640-41, when he joined the standard of the Braganzas, and fought for the independence of his own country. His life, which extended from 1611 to 1667, was full of adventure. He was in the dreadful tempest of 1627, when the whole navy, as it were, of Portugal suffered shipwreck; and it fell to his lot to bury above two thousand bodies of those who had perished in the waves, from which he himself had hardly escaped. He was in the wars of Flanders and of Catalonia. Twelve years he was in prison in his own country, under an accusation of murder that was at last proved to be without foundation; and six years he was an exile in Brazil. But under all circumstances, and through all his trials, he sought consolation in letters. His published works, in prose and verse, in Spanish and in Portuguese, some of which have been already noticed, exceed a hundred volumes, and the unpublished[p. 162] would materially increase even this vast amount. What is more remarkable, he is, in both languages, admitted to the honors of a classic writer.

His “History of the War of Catalonia,” which embraces only the short period during which he served in it, was written while he was in prison, and was first published in 1645. Owing to political causes, he did not give his name to it; and when one of his friends in a letter expressed surprise at this circumstance, he answered, with a characteristic turn of phrase, “The book loses nothing for want of my name, and I shall lose nothing for want of the book.” It was, however, successful. The accounts of the first outbreak in Barcelona, on the feast of Corpus Christi, when the city was thronged with the bold peasantry of the interior; the subsequent strife of the exasperated factions; the debates in the Junta of Catalonia, and those in the king’s council, under the leading of the Count Duke Olivares; and the closing scene of the whole,—the ineffectual storming of the grand fortress of Mon Juich by the royal forces, and the disastrous retreat that followed,—are all given with a freshness and power that could come only from one who had shared in the feelings he describes, and had witnessed the very movements he sets with such a lifelike spirit before us. His style, too, is suited to his varying subjects; sometimes animated and forcible, sometimes quaint and idiomatic, and sometimes in its dark hints and abrupt turns reminding us of Tacitus. But the work is short,—not longer than that of Mendoza, which was its model,—and it covers only the space of about six months at the end of 1640 and the beginning of 1641.

Whether Melo intended to carry his narrative farther is uncertain. From his striking conclusion, where he[p. 163] says, “The events that followed—greater in themselves than those I have related—are perhaps reserved for a greater historian,” we might infer that he was desirous to describe only what he had witnessed. But, on the other side, in his Preface we have the following characteristic address to his readers, alluding to the concealment of his name as the author of the work he offers them. “If in any thing I have served you, I ask only that you would not endeavour to know more of me than it pleases my humor to tell you. I present to you my faithful opinion of things, just as it has been my lot to form it;—I do not present myself to you; for a knowledge of my person is not necessary to enable you to judge either kindly or harshly of what I have written. If I do not please you, read me no further;—if I do, I make no claims on your gratitude. I speak without fear and without vanity. The theatre before us is vast; the tragedy long. We shall meet again. You will know me by my voice; I shall know you by your judgment.” But, whatever may have been Melo’s original intentions, he survived the publication of this interesting work above twenty years, and yet added nothing to its pages.[218]

From this period, prose composition, which had been long infected with the bad taste of the age, suffered a[p. 164] still further and more marked decline. Saavedra Faxardo, indeed, who lived forty years out of Spain, employed in diplomatic missions, was educated in a better school, and formed himself on more worthy models, than he could have found among his contemporaries at home; but his “History of the Goths in Spain” is an imperfect work, published in 1646, at Munster, when he was there as a member of the congress that made the peace of Westphalia, and was left unfinished at his death, which occurred at Madrid two years later.[219] The only historian of eminence that remains to be noticed in this period is, therefore, Solís.

Of him we have already spoken as a lyrical poet and a dramatist, who in 1667 had retired from the world, and dedicated himself to the separate service of religion. He was, however, the official historiographer of the Indies, and thought himself bound to do something in fulfilment of the duties of an office to which, perhaps, a nominal income was attached. He chose for his subject “The Conquest of Mexico,” and, beginning with the condition of Spain when it was undertaken, and the appointment of Cortés to command the invading force, he brings his history down to the fall of the city and the capture of Guatimozin. The period it embraces is, indeed, short,—less than three years; but they are years so crowded with brilliant adventures and atrocious crimes, that hardly any portion of the history of the world is of equal interest. The subject, too, from this circumstance, is more easily managed; and Solís, who looked upon it with the eye of an artist, as well as of an historian, has succeeded in giving his work, to[p. 165] an extraordinary degree, the air of an historical epic;—so exactly are all its parts and episodes modelled into an harmonious whole, whose catastrophe is the fall of the great Mexican empire.

The style of Solís is somewhat peculiar. That he had the Roman historians, and especially Livy, before him, as he wrote, is apparent both in the general air of his work and in the structure of its individual sentences. Yet there are few writers of Spanish prose who are more absolutely Castilian in their idiom than he is. His language, if not simple, is rich and beautiful; suited to the romantic subject he had chosen for his history, and deeply imbued with its poetical spirit. In boldness of manner he falls below Mendoza, and in dignity is not equal to Mariana; but for copious and sustained eloquence, he may be placed by the side of either of them. That his work is as interesting as either of theirs is proved by the unimpaired popularity it has enjoyed from its first appearance down to our own times.

The Conquest of Mexico was written in the old age of its author, and is darkened by the feelings that shut him out from the interests and cares of the world. He refused to see the fierce and marvellous contest which he recorded, except from the steps of the altar where he had been consecrated. The Spaniards, therefore, are in his eyes only Christians; the Mexicans, only heathen. The battle he witnesses and describes is wholly between the powers of light and the legions of darkness; and the unhappy Indians,—whom the Spaniards had no more right to invade, in order to root out religious abominations, of which they had never heard till after their landing, than Henry the Eighth or Elizabeth had to invade Spain, in order to root out the[p. 166] abominations of the Spanish Inquisition,—the unhappy Indians receive none of the historian’s sympathy in the extremity of suffering they underwent during their vain, but heroic, struggle for all that could make existence valuable in their eyes.

The work of Solís, beautifully written and flattering to the national vanity, was at once successful. But success was then a word whose meaning was different from that which it bears now, or had borne in Spain in the time of Lope de Vega. The publication, which took place in 1684, by the assistance of a friend who defrayed the charges, found its author poor and left him so. On this point there are passages in his correspondence which it is painful to read;—one, for instance, where he says, “I have many creditors who would stop me in the street, if they saw I had new shoes on”; and another, where he asks a friend for a warm garment to protect him from the winter’s cold. Still he was gratified at the applause with which his work was received, though, at the end of a year, only two hundred copies had been sold. Two years afterwards he died, at the age of seventy-six, “leaving,” in the technical phrase and the technical habit of the time, “his soul to be the only heir of his body,” or, in other words, giving the remnants of his poverty to purchase expiatory masses.[220] Diego de Tovar, the same ecclesiastic who had been confessor to Quevedo and Nicolas Antonio, stood by the bedside of the dying man, and consoled the last moments of Solís, as he had consoled theirs.[221]

[p. 167]Solís was the last of the good writers in the elder school of Spanish history;—a school which, even during its best days, numbered but few names, and which, now that the whole literature of the country was decaying, shared the general fate. Nor could it be otherwise. The spirit of political tyranny in the government, and of religious tyranny in the Inquisition,—now closer than ever united,—were more hostile to bold and faithful inquiry in the department of history than in almost any other; so that the generous national independence and honesty announced in the old chronicles were stopped midway in their career, before half of their power had been put forth.

Still, as we have seen, several of the historians that were produced even under the overshadowing influence of the Austrian family were not unworthy of the national character. Mariana shows much manly firmness, Solís much fervor, Zurita much conscientious diligence, while Mendoza, Moncada, Coloma, and Melo, who confined themselves to subjects embracing shorter periods and less wide interests, have given us some of the most striking sketches to be found in the historical literature of any country. All of them are rich and dignified, abounding rather in feeling than philosophy, and written in a tone and style that mark, not so much, perhaps, the peculiar genius of their respective authors, as that of the country that gave them birth; so that, though they may not be entirely classical, they are entirely Spanish; and what they want in finish and grace, they make up in picturesqueness and originality.[222]

The last department in the literature of any country, that comes within the jurisdiction of criticism on account of its style, is that of Didactic Prose; since in this branch, so remote from every thing poetical, the ornaments of manner are more accidental than they are elsewhere, and, beyond it, are not at all to be exacted. In modern times, the French seem to have been more anxious than any other nation, not excepting even the Italians, to add the grace of an elegant style to their didactic prose, while, on the other hand, none have been more unsuccessful than the Spaniards in their attempts to cultivate it.

In one particular form of didactic composition, however, Spain stands in advance of all other countries; I mean that of Proverbs, which Cervantes has happily called “short sentences drawn from long experience.”[223] Spanish proverbs can be traced back to the earliest[p. 170] times. One of the best known—“Laws go where kings please they should”—is connected with an event of importance in the reign of Alfonso the Sixth, who died in the beginning of the twelfth century, when the language of Castile had hardly a distinct existence.[224] Another has been traced to a custom belonging to the days of the Infantes de Lara, and is itself probably of not much later date.[225] Others are found in the General Chronicle, which is one of the oldest of Spanish prose compositions, and among them is the happy one on disappointed expectations, cited in Don Quixote more than once: “He went for wool and came back shorn.”[226] Several occur in the “Conde Lucanor” of Don John Manuel,[227] and many in the poetry of the Archpriest of Hita,[228] both of whom lived in the time of Alfonso the Eleventh.

Thus far, however, we have only separate and isolated sayings, evidently belonging to the old Spanish race, and always used as if quite familiar and notorious. But in the reign of John the Second, and at his request, the Marquis of Santillana collected a hundred[p. 171] in rhyme, which we have already noticed, besides above six hundred, he says, such as the old women were wont to repeat in their chimney-corners. From this period, therefore, or rather from 1508, when this collection was published, the old and wise proverbs of the language may be regarded as having obtained a settled place in its didactic literature.[229]

The number of proverbs, indeed, was soon so great,—not only those floating about in the common talk of men, but those collected and printed,—that they began to be turned to account. Garay, who was attached to the cathedral of Toledo, and therefore lived in the centre of whatever was peculiarly Castilian, wrote a long letter, every sentence of which was a popular saying; to which he added two similar letters, found, as he says, by accident, and made up, in the same way, of proverbs.[230] But, in the middle of the century, a still higher honor awaited the old Spanish adages. Pedro Valles, who wrote the history of the great Marquis of Pescara, published an alphabetical series of four thousand three hundred of them in 1549; and the famous Greek scholar and distinguished nobleman, Hernan Nuñez de Guzman, Professor successively at Alcalá and at Salamanca, found amusement for his old age[p. 172] in making another series of them, which amounted in all to above six thousand. To some he added explanations; to others, various parallel sayings from different languages; but, finding his strength fail him, he gave the task to a friend, who, like himself, was a Professor in Salamanca, and who published the whole in 1555, two years after the death of Nuñez; rather, as he intimates, from respect to the person from whom he received it, than from regard to the dignity of the employment.[231]

Out of these proverbs, another of the friends of Hernan Nuñez—Mal Lara, a Sevilian—selected a thousand, and, adding a commentary to each, published them in 1568, under the not inappropriate title of “Philosophy of the Common People”; a volume which, notwithstanding its cumbersome learning, can be read with pleasure, both for the style in which many parts of it are written, and for the unusual historical anecdotes with which it abounds. Another collection, made by Palmireno, a Valencian, in 1569, consisting of above two hundred proverbs appropriate to the table, shows how abundant popular aphorisms must be in a language that can furnish so many on one subject. Yet another, by Oudin, was published at Paris in 1608, for the use of foreigners, and shows no less plainly how much the Spanish had become spread throughout Europe. Sorapan, in 1616 and 1617, published two collections, in which it was intended that the condensation of popular experience and wisdom should teach medicine, as, in the hands of Mal Lara, they had been made to teach the philosophy of life. And, finally, in 1675, Cejudo, a[p. 173] schoolmaster of Val de Peñas, gave the world about six thousand, with the corresponding Latin adages, whenever he could find them, and with explanations more satisfactory than had been furnished by his predecessors.[232]

Still, though so many thousands have been collected, many thousands still remain unpublished, known only among the traditions of the humbler classes of society, that have given birth to them all. Juan de Yriarte, a learned man, who was nearly forty years at the head of the King’s Library at Madrid, collected, about the middle of the eighteenth century, no less than twenty-four thousand; and yet it is not to be supposed that a single individual, however industrious, living in Madrid, could exhaust their number, as they belong rather to the provinces than to the capital, and are spread everywhere among the common people, and through all their dialects.[233]

Why proverbs should abound so much more in Spain than in any other country of Christendom, it is not possible to tell. Perhaps the Arabs, whose language is rich in such wisdom, may have furnished some of them;[p. 174] or perhaps the whole mass may have sprung from the original soil of the less cultivated classes of Spanish society. But however this may be, we know they are often among the pleasantest and most characteristic ornaments of the national literature; and those who are most familiar with them will be most ready to agree with the wise author of the “Dialogue on Languages,” when he says, and repeats the remark, that we must go to the old national proverbs for what is purest in his native Castilian.[234]

Turning now to the proper Didactic prose of Spanish literature, the first instance we find—after those formerly noticed as imitating the Italian philosophical discussions of the sixteenth century—is one that comes near to the borders of fiction. It is “The Garden of Curious Flowers,” by Torquemada, originally published in 1570, of which the curate, in the scrutiny of Don Quixote’s library, says, that “he does not know whether it is more true, or, to speak strictly, less full of lies,” than the “Olivante de Laura,” a book of chivalry by the same author, which, for its peculiar absurdities, he sends at once to the bonfire in the court-yard. “The Garden of Curious Flowers,” however, is still a curious book. It consists of six colloquies between friends, who talk for their amusement on such subjects as the monstrous productions of nature, the terrestrial paradise, phantasms and enchantments, the influence of the stars, and the history and condition of those countries[p. 175] that lie nearest to the North Pole. It is, in fact, a collection of whatever strange and extravagant stories a learned man could make, beginning with such as he found in Aristotle, Pliny, Solinus, Olaus Magnus, and Albertus Magnus, and including those told by the most credulous of his own time. Being put into a form then popular, and related in a pleasing style, they had no little success. They were several times printed in the original, and, beside being translated into Italian and French, are well known to those who are curious in the literature of Queen Elizabeth’s time, under the much-abused name of “The Spanish Mandeville.” It may be added, that some of Torquemada’s accounts of spectres and visions are still pleasant reading; and that, though Cervantes spoke slightingly of the whole book in his “Don Quixote,” he afterwards resorted to it, both for facts and for fancies respecting the wonders of Friesland and Iceland, when he wrote the first part of his “Persiles and Sigismunda.”[235]

Christóval de Acosta, a Portuguese botanist,—who was accustomed to call himself “the African,” because he happened to be born in one of the African possessions of Portugal,—travelled much in the East, and after his return published, in 1578, a work on Oriental plants and drugs, to which he added at the end a treatise on the natural history of the Elephant. But, though he succeeded in attracting the attention of Europe to this publication, and though the early part of his life had been that of a soldier, an adventurer, and a[p. 176] captive among pirates and robbers, he spent many of his later years, if not all of them, in religious retirement at home, where, besides other things, he wrote a discourse on “The Benefits of Solitude,” and a treatise on “The Praise of Women.” The last was printed in 1592, and, except that it is too full of learning, may still be read with some interest, if not with pleasure.[236]

It was not, however, moral and philosophical writers, like Oliva and Guevara, nor writers on subjects connected with natural history, like Torquemada and Acosta, that were most favored in the reigns of Philip the Second and his immediate successors. It was the ascetics and mystics,—the natural produce of the soil of Spain, and, almost without exception, faithful to the old Castilian genius.

Among the most prominent of this class was Luis de Granada, distinguished as a Spanish preacher, but still more remarkable for his eloquence as a mystic. His “Meditations for the Seven Days and Nights of a Week,” his treatises “On Prayer” and “On Faith,” and his “Memorial of a Christian Life,” were early translated into Latin, Italian, French, and English,—one of them into Turkish, and one into Japanese,—and, like his other Spanish works, have continued to be printed and admired in the original down to our own times.

The most effective of them all was his “Guide for Sinners,” first published in 1556. It makes two moderate volumes, and portions of it are marked with a diffuse[p. 177] declamation, which is perhaps imitated from that of Juan de Avila, the Apostle of Andalusia, whose friend and follower he more than once boasts himself to have been. But its general tone is that of a moving and harmonious eloquence, which has made it a favorite book of devotion in Spain ever since it first appeared, and has spread its reputation so widely, that it has been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe, including the Greek and Polish, and, at one time, seemed likely to obtain a place, in the religious literature of Christendom, very near that of the great ascetic work which passes under the name of Thomas à Kempis. In its native country, however, the Guide for Sinners encountered at first not a little opposition. As early as the year after it was published, it had been placed on the Index Expurgatorius, and no edition except the first seems to have been permitted till we find that of Salamanca, in 1570. But the very Index that condemned it became itself the subject of condemnation; and, in the case of the Guide for Sinners, the ecclesiastical powers went so far in the opposite direction as to grant special indulgences by proclamation to all who should have read or heard a chapter of the very work they had earlier so harshly censured.

Luis de Granada passed all the latter part of his life in Lisbon,—perhaps because he had been repeatedly annoyed by the Inquisition at home, perhaps because his duties seemed to lead him there. But, whatever may have been the cause, it is certain that he enjoyed much more favor in Portugal than he did in Spain; and when he died, in 1588, eighty-four years old, he could boast that he had refused the highest honors of the Portuguese Church, and humbly devoted the whole of his long life to the reformation and advancement of[p. 178] the Order of Preachers, of which, during his best years, he had been the active and venerated head.[237]

San Juan de la Cruz, who was in some respects an imitator of Luis de Granada, was born in 1542, and, having spent the greater part of his life in reforming the discipline of the Carmelite monasteries, died in 1591, and was beatified in 1674. His works, which are chiefly contemplative, and obtained for him the title of the Ecstatic Doctor, are written with great fervor. The chief of them are the allegory of “The Ascent to Mount Carmel,” and “The Dark Night of the Soul,”—treatises which have given him much reputation for a mystical eloquence, that sometimes rises to the sublime, and sometimes is lost in the unintelligible. His poetry, of which a little is printed in some of the many editions of his works, is of the same general character, but marked by great felicity and richness of phraseology.[238]

Santa Teresa, who was associated with Juan de la Cruz in the work of reforming the Carmelites,—or rather with whom he was associated, since hers was the leading spirit,—died in 1582, sixty-seven years old. Her didactic works, the most remarkable of which are “The Path to Perfection” and “The Interior Castle,” are less obscure than those of her coadjutor, though more declamatory. But all she wrote, including an account of her own life, and several discussions connected with the religious duties to which she dedicated herself, were composed with apparent reluctance on her[p. 179] part, and in obedience to the commands of her superiors. She believed herself to be often in direct communion with God; and as those about her shared her faith on this point, she was continually urged by them to make known to the world what were thus regarded as revelations of the Divine will. On one occasion she says: “Far within, God appeared to me in a vision, as he has been wont to do, and gave me his right hand, and said,—Behold this print of the nail; it is a sign that, from this day forth, thou art my spouse. Hitherto, thou hast not deserved it; but hereafter not only shalt thou regard my honor as that of thy Creator, and King, and God, but as that of a true spouse;—for my honor is now thine, and thine is mine.”

Living, as she undoubtedly did, under the persuasion that she was favored with numberless revelations of this kind, she wrote boldly and rapidly, and corrected nothing. Her style, in consequence, is diffuse and open to objections, which, in Spain, the spirit of a merely literary criticism is too reverent to desire to remove. But whatever she wrote is full of earnestness, sincerity, and love; and therefore her works have never ceased to be read by those of her own nation and faith. During her life, she was persecuted by the Inquisition; but after her death, her manuscripts were collected with pious care, and published, in 1588, by Luis de Leon, who exhorts all men to follow in the bright path she has pointed out to them; adding, “She has seen God face to face, and she now shows him to you.”[239]

[p. 180]

This school of spiritualists, to which belonged Juan de Avila and Luis de Leon, of whom we have before spoken, had, no doubt, a very considerable effect on Spanish didactic prose. They raised its tone, and did more towards placing it on the old foundations, where the chronicles and the earlier writers of the country, like Lucena, had left it, than had been done for nearly two centuries. Such efforts gave dignity, if not purity or an exact finish, to the proper Castilian style; so that, at the end of the reign of Philip the Second, it was not only of more consequence to an author’s reputation to write well upon any grave subject in prose than it had ever been before, but, with such examples before him, it was easier to do so. In all this, the movement made was in the right direction, and produced happy results. But, on the other hand, we should remember that it confirmed in the didactic literature of the country that tendency to a diffuse and florid declamation, which was early one of its blemishes, and from which, with such authority in its favor, Castilian prose has never since been able completely to emancipate itself.

A remarkable proof of this is to be found in “The Magdalen” of Malon de Chaide, first published in 1592, after the death of its author. It is a religious work, and is divided into four parts; the first being merely introductory, and the three others on the three characters of Mary Magdalen as a sinner, a penitent, and a saint. It has a very rhetorical air throughout, and sometimes reads almost like a romance;—so free is its[p. 181] conception of the character and conversations of the saint. But some of its discussions, like one on fashionable dress, and one on religious pictures, are curious; and some of its religious exhortations, like that to repent before old age comes on, are moving and powerful. The moral tone of the whole is severe. With a great deal of the spirit of a monk, the author is earnest against books of chivalry; and he not only rebukes the habit of reading the ancient classics, but even such Spanish poets as Garcilasso de la Vega, because he thinks admiration of them inconsistent with a preservation of the Christian character. Occasionally, he grows mystical; and then, though his style is more than ever prodigal, his meaning is not always plain. But, on the whole, and regarded as an exhortation to a religious life, the Conversion of Mary Magdalen is written with so much richness of language, and is often so eloquent, that it was much read when it first appeared, and has not, even in recent times, ceased to be reprinted and admired.[240]

Quite different from this is “The Amusing Journey” of Roxas,—a book that hardly falls within the strict limits of any class, but one which has always been popular in Spain. Its author was an actor; and his travels consist of an account of some of his personal adventures and experiences, thrown into the form of dialogues between three of his fellow-comedians and himself, as they[p. 182] visit some of the principal cities of Spain in the exercise of their profession as strolling players. They travel on foot; and their conversations, which are little molested by scruples of any sort, make up a very amusing book.

In some parts of it, we have sketches of the places they visit, with notices of the local history belonging to each. In others, Roxas himself, in a spirit that not unfrequently reminds us of Gil Blas, relates his own previous adventures, as a soldier, as a captive in France, and as a play-actor at home. In yet others, we have fictions, or what seem to be such, and among them, the story on which Shakspeare founded his Christopher Sly and the Induction to “The Taming of the Shrew.” But, in general, it is rather an account of what relates to the theatre and the affairs of the four gay companions at Seville, Toledo, Segovia, Valladolid, Granada, and on the roads between all of them, interspersed with forty or fifty loas, which Roxas wrote with recognized success, and of which he is evidently very proud. It is a pleasant book, loosely and carelessly put together, but important for the history of the Spanish drama, and with talent enough to attract the attention of Scarron, who took from it the hint for his “Roman Comique.” From internal evidence, “The Amusing Journey” was written in 1602, and, at the end, a continuation is announced; but, like so many other promises of the same sort in Spanish literature, it was never kept.[241]

Perhaps the work of Roxas served, also, as a hint for[p. 183] the “Pasagero,” or Traveller, of Suarez de Figueroa. At any rate, the well-known author of the “Amarillis,” published in 1617, a half-narrative, half-didactic work with this title, containing ten long discussions, on a great variety of subjects, held by four persons, as they journey from Madrid to Barcelona, in order to embark for Italy;—the discussions themselves being called alivios, or rests by the way. The chief conversation is in the hands of Figueroa, the principal person in his own drama; and so far as he is concerned, and so far as the discussions relate to the men of letters of his own time, the Pasagero is somewhat cynical. His autobiography, which is contained in the eighth dialogue, is interesting, and so are the ninth and tenth dialogues, in which he gives his view of the state of Spain at the time he wrote, and the means of leading an honest and honorable life there. But the most important conversations are the third, which relates to the theatre, and the fourth, which is on the popular and courtly mode of preaching. The whole work is too diffuse in its style, though less declamatory than much in the didactic prose of the period.[242]

[p. 184]

Some of the best portions of the didactic literature of Spain during the seventeenth century were partly or wholly political. Marquez, a writer in the old style of the reign of Philip the Second, published in 1612 his “Christian Governor,” a work composed at the request of the Duke of Feria, then viceroy of Sicily, and intended to serve as an answer to Machiavelli’s “Prince.”[243] Vera y Zuñiga, author of a strange epic on the conquest of Seville, who was a better minister of Philip the Third than he was poet, published in 1620 a treatise, in four discourses, on the character and duties of an ambassador; full of learning, and occasionally illustrated with appropriate anecdotes drawn from Spanish history, but citing indiscriminately books of authority and no authority on the grave subjects he discusses, and relying apparently with as much confidence upon an opinion of Ovid as upon one of Comines.[244] Fernandez de Navarrete, a secretary of the same monarch, chose his subject a little higher up, and in 1625, under the disguise of an assumed name, and in a letter to a Polish prime-minister who never existed, gave the world his notions of what “a royal favorite” should be; but it is evident that Spain only was in his thoughts when he wrote, and his little treatise is so encumbered with ill-assorted learning and ungraceful conceits that it was soon forgotten.[245]

[p. 185]Not so the “Idea of a Christian Prince,” by Saavedra Faxardo, who died at Madrid in 1648, after having been long in the diplomatic service of the Spanish crown. It was a higher subject than either of those taken by Navarrete and Figueroa, and managed with more talent. Under the awkward arrangement of a hundred ingenious Emblems, with mottoes, that are generally well chosen and pointed, he has given a hundred essays on the education of a prince;—his relations with his ministers and subjects; his duties as the head of a state in its internal and external relations; and his duties to himself in old age and in preparation for death;—all intended for the instruction of Balthasar, son of Philip the Fourth, to whom it is dedicated, but who died too young to profit by its wisdom. It is written in a compact, sententious style, with much quaint and curious knowledge of history, and with a large and not always judicious display of learning. But in many points it reminds us of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Cabinet Council” and Owen Feltham’s “Resolves”;—a measure of praise that can be given to few such prose works in the Spanish language. Its success was great; nor is it yet fallen into neglect. The first edition was published in 1640, at Munster. Many others followed in the course of the century. It was translated into all the languages of Europe, and, in Spain at least, has continued to be printed and valued down to our own days.[246]

[p. 186]

“The Divine Politics” of Quevedo, a part of which was published before the Christian Prince and a part after it, may have suggested his subject to Saavedra, but not the mode of treating it; and, in the same way, the great satirist may have had some influence in determining Antonio de Vega, the Portuguese, to write his “Political Dream of a Perfect Nobleman,” in 1620;[247] Nieremberg, the Jesuit, to write his “Manual for Gentlemen and Princes,” which appeared in 1629;[248] and Benavente, his “Advice for Kings, Princes, and Ambassadors,” which appeared in 1643.[249] But none of these works, nor any thing else in the nature of didactic[p. 187] prose that appeared in the seventeenth century, is equal to the Christian Prince of Saavedra; unless, indeed, we are to except his own vision of a state, which he calls “The Literary Republic,” and in which he discusses somewhat satirically, but in a vein of agreeable criticism, the merits of the principal writers of ancient and modern times, foreign and Spanish. The Literary Republic, however, was not published till after its author’s death, and never enjoyed a popularity like that enjoyed by his longer and elder work; a work which leaves far behind every thing in the class of books of emblems, that so long served to tax the ingenuity of the higher classes of society in Europe.[250]

To these writers of the end of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century a few more might be added, of less consequence. Juan de Guzman, in 1589, published a formal treatise on Rhetoric, in the seventh dialogue of which he makes an ingenious application of the rules of the Greek and Roman masters to the demands of modern sermonizing in Spain.[251] Gracian Dantisco, one of the secretaries of Philip the Second, published in 1599 a small discourse on the minor morals of life, which he called the “Galateo,” in imitation of Giovanni della Casa, whose classical Italian treatise bearing the same name was already translated into Spanish.[252] In the same year appeared a curious[p. 188] work by Pedro de Andrada, on “The Art of Horsemanship,” well written and learned, with amusing anecdotes of horses; and this was followed, in 1605, by a similar treatise of Simon de Villalobos, but one which, from its more military character, and from the exaggerated importance it gives to its subject, might well have been made a part of Don Quixote’s library.[253] Both of them bear marks of the state of society at the time they were written.

Paton, the author of several works of little value, published, in 1604, a crude treatise on “The Art of Spanish Eloquence,” founded on the rules of the ancients;[254] and, in Mexico, Aleman, while living there, printed, in 1609, a treatise on “Castilian Orthography,” which, besides what is appropriate to the title, contains pleasant discussions on other topics connected with the language, over which he has himself shown a great mastery in his “Guzman de Alfarache.”[255] A series of conversations on miscellaneous subjects, divided into seven nights, which their author, Faria y Sousa, intended to have called simply “Moral Dialogues,” but which his bookseller, without his knowledge, published in 1624 with the title of “Brilliant Nights,” are dull and pedantic, like nearly every thing this learned Portuguese wrote; and the second part, which he offered to the public, was never called for.[256] And, finally, an[p. 189]other Portuguese, Francisco de Portugal, who died in 1632,[257] wrote a pleasant treatise on “The Art of Gallantry,” with anecdotes showing the state of fashionable, or rather courtly, society at the time; but it was not printed till long after its author’s death.[258]

[p. 190]During the period embraced by the works last mentioned, a false taste had invaded Spanish prose. It was the same unhappy taste which we have noticed in Spanish poetry by the name of “Gongorism,” but which its admirers called sometimes “the polite,” and sometimes “the cultivated,” style of writing. Traces of it have been sought in the sixteenth century among some of the best writers of the country; but for this there seems no foundation, except in the fact, that a rigorous taste never at any time prevailed in Spain, and that the luxuriant success of letters towards the end of the reign of Philip the Second, and the consequent difficulty of obtaining fashionable distinction by authorship, had led to occasional affectations even in the style of those who, like Cervantes and Mariana, stood foremost among the better writers of their time.

But now, the admiration that followed Góngora almost necessarily introduced conceits into prose writing, such as were thought so worthy of imitation in poetry. Those, therefore, who most coveted public favor, began to play with words, and seek to surprise by an unexpected opposition of ideas and quaintness of metaphor, little consistent with the old Castilian dignity, until at last they quite left the stately constructions in which[p. 191] resides so much of what is peculiar to the sonorous declamations of Luis de Leon and Luis de Granada, and by excessive efforts at brilliancy became so involved and obscure, that they were not always intelligible. Instances of such affectation may be found in Saavedra and Francisco de Portugal. But the innovation itself is older than either of their published works. It broke out with Paravicino, who, besides imitating Góngora’s poetry, as we have already seen, carried similar extravagances of metaphor and construction into his oratorical and didactic prose; intimating, in a characteristic phrase, that he claimed the honor of being the Columbus who had made this great discovery. As early as 1620, it was matter of censure and ridicule to Liñan, in his “Guide to Strangers in Madrid,” and soon afterwards to Mateo Velazquez, in his “Village Philosopher”; so that from this period we may consider cultismo nearly or quite as prevalent in Spanish prose as it was in Spanish poetry.[259]

The person, however, who settled its character, and in some respects gave it an air of philosophical pretension, was Balthazar Gracian, a Jesuit of Aragon, who lived between 1601 and 1658; exactly the period when the cultivated style took possession of Spanish prose, and rose to its greatest consideration. He began in 1630, by a tract called “The Hero,” which is not so[p. 192] much the description of a hero’s character as it is a recipe to form one, given in short, compact sentences, constructed in the new style. It was successful, and was followed by five or six other works, written in the same manner; after which, to confirm and justify them all, there appeared, in 1648, his “Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio”; a regular Art of Poetry, or rather system of rhetoric, accommodated to the school of Góngora, and showing great acuteness, especially in the ingenuity with which the author presses into his service the elder poets, such as Diego de Mendoza, the Argensolas, and even Luis de Leon and the Bachiller de la Torre.

The most remarkable work of Gracian, however, is his “Críticon,” published in three parts, between 1650 and 1653. It is an allegory on human life, and gives us the adventures of Critilus, a noble Spaniard, wrecked on the desert island of Saint Helena, where he finds a solitary savage, who knows nothing about himself, except that he has been nursed by a wild beast. After much communication in dumb show, they are able to understand each other in Spanish, and, being taken from the island, travel together through the world, talking often of the leading men of their time in Spain, but holding intercourse more with allegorical personages than with one another. The story of their adventures is long, and its three portions represent the three periods of human life; the first being called the Spring of Childhood, the second the Autumn of Manhood, and the third the Winter of Old Age. In some parts it shows much talent; and eloquent discussions on moral subjects, and glowing descriptions of events and natural scenery, can be taken from it, which are little infected with the extravagances of the Cultivated Style. Sometimes, we are reminded of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,”—as, for instance,[p. 193] in the scenes of the World’s Fair,—and might almost say, that the “Críticon” is to the Catholic religion and the notions of life in Spain during the reign of Philip the Fourth, what Bunyan’s fiction is to Puritanism and the English character in the age of Cromwell. But there is no vitality in the shadowy personages of Gracian. He bodies nothing forth to which our sympathies can attach themselves as they do to such sharply-defined creations as Christian and Mr. Greatheart, and, when we are moved at all by him, it is only by his acuteness and eloquence.

His other works are of little value, and are yet more deformed by bad taste; especially his “Politico-Fernando,” which is an extravagant eulogium on Ferdinand the Catholic, and his “Discreto,” which is a collection of prose miscellanies, including a few of his letters. It is singular, that, in consequence of being an ecclesiastic, he thought it proper that all his works should be printed under the name of his brother Lorenzo, who lived at Seville; and it is yet more singular, perhaps, that they were published, not by himself, but by his friend, Lastañosa, a gentleman of literary taste, and a collector of ancient works of art, who lived at Huesca in Aragon. But however indirectly and cautiously the works of Gracian won their way into the world, they enjoyed great favor there, and made much noise. His “Hero” went early through six editions, and his collected prose works, most of which were translated into French and Italian, and some of them into English and Latin, were often reprinted in the original Spanish, both at home and abroad.[260]

[p. 194]

From this period, the rich old prose style of Luis de Leon and his contemporaries may be said to have been driven out of Spanish literature. Lope de Vega and Quevedo, after resisting the innovations of cultismo for a time, had long before yielded, and Calderon was now alternately assailing the depraved taste of his audiences and gratifying it by running into extravagances almost as great as those he ridiculed. The language of the most affected poetry passed into the prose of the age, and took from it the power and dignity which, even in its more declamatory portions, had constituted its prominent merit. Style became fantastic, and the very thoughts that were to be conveyed were not unfrequently covered up with ingenuities of illustration till they disappeared. In the phrase of Sancho, men wanted better bread than could be made of wheat, and rendered themselves ridiculous by attempting to obtain it. Tropes and figures of all kinds were settled into formulas of speech, and then were repeated appropriately and inappropriately, till the reader could often anticipate, from the beginning of a sentence, how it would inevitably end. Every thing, indeed, in prose composition, as in poetry, announced that corrupted taste which both precedes and hastens the decay of a literature; and which, in the case of Spain during the latter half of the seventeenth century, was but the concomitant of a general decline in the arts and the gradual degradation of the monarchy.

Among those who wrote best, though still infected with the prevailing influences, was Zabaleta. His “Moral Problems” and “Famous Errors,” but espe[p. 195]cially his “Feast Days at Madrid,” in which he gives lively satirical sketches of the manners of the metropolis at those periods when idleness brings the people into the streets and places of amusement, are worth reading. But he lived in the reign of Philip the Fourth; and so did Lozano, whose different ascetic works on the character of King David, if not so good as his historical romance on the New Kings of Toledo, are better than any thing else of the kind in the same period. They are, however, the last that can be read. The reign of Charles the Second does not offer examples even so favorable as these of the remains and ruins of a better taste. “The Labors of Hercules,” by Heredia, in 1682, and the “Moral Essays on Boëthius,” by Ramirez, in 1698, if they serve for nothing else, serve at least to mark the ultimate limits of dulness and affectation. Indeed, if it were not for the History of Solís, which has been already noticed, we should look in vain for an instance of respectable prose composition after this last and most degenerate descendant of the House of Austria had mounted the Spanish throne.[261]

[p. 196]

Nor is this remarkable. On the contrary, it is rather to be considered worthy of notice, that didactic prose should have had any merit or obtained any success in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the end it proposes is not, like that of poetry, to amuse, but, like that of philosophy, to enlighten and amend; and how dangerous in Spain was the social position of any teacher or moral monitor, who claimed for himself that degree of independence of opinion without which instruction becomes a dead form, needs not now to be set forth. Few persons, in that unhappy country, were surrounded with more difficulties; none were more strictly watched, or, if they wandered from the permitted paths, were more severely punished.

Nor was it possible for such persons, by the most notorious earnestness in their convictions of the just control of the religion of the state, or any degree of faithfulness in their loyalty, to avoid sometimes falling under the rebuke of the jealousy that watched each step of their course; a fact sufficiently apparent, when we recollect that nearly all the didactic writers of merit during this period, such as Juan de Avila, Luis de Leon, Luis de Granada, Quevedo, San Juan de la Cruz, and Santa Teresa, were persecuted by the Inquisition or by the government, and the works of every one of them expurgated or forbidden.

Under such oppression, free and eloquent writers,—men destined to teach and advance their generation,—could not be expected to appear, and the few who ventured into ways so dangerous dwelt as much as possible in generals, and became mystical, like Juan de la Cruz, or extravagant and declamatory, like Luis de Granada. Nearly all,—strictly prevented from using the logic of a wise and liberal philosophy,—fell into[p. 197] pedantry, from an anxious desire, wherever it was possible, to lean upon authority; so that, from Luis de Leon down to the most ordinary writer, who, in a prefatory letter of approbation, wished to give currency to the opinions of a friend, no man seemed to feel at ease unless he could justify and sustain what he had to say by citations from the Scriptures, the fathers of the Church, and the ancient and scholastic philosophers. Thus, Spanish didactic prose, which, from its original elements and tendencies, seemed destined to wear the attractions of an elevated and eloquent style, gradually became so formal, awkward, and pedantic, that, with a few striking exceptions, it can only be said to have maintained a doubtful and difficult existence during the long period when the less suspected and less oppressed portions of the literature of the country—its drama and its lyric poetry—were in the meridian of their success.

It is impossible to study with care the Spanish literature of the seventeenth century, and not feel that we are in the presence of a general decay of the national character. At every step, as we advance, the number of writers that surround us is diminished. In what crowds they were gathered together during the reigns of Philip the Second and Philip the Third, we may see in the long lists of poets given by Cervantes in his “Galatea” and his “Journey to Parnassus,” and by Lope de Vega in his “Laurel of Apollo.” But in the reign of Philip the Fourth, though the theatre, from accidental circumstances, flourished more than ever, the other departments showed symptoms of decline; and in the reign of Charles the Second, wherever we turn, the number of authors sinks away, till it is obvious that some great change must take place, or elegant literature in Spain will speedily become extinct.

The public interest, too, in the few writers that remained, was gone. At least, that general, national interest, which alone can sustain the life it alone can[p. 199] give to the literature of any country, was no longer there; and all the favor, that Spanish poets and men of letters enjoyed at the end of the century, came from the court and the superficial fashion of the time, which patronized the affected style of those followers of Góngora, whose bad taste seemed to go on increasing in extravagance, as talent among them grew more rare.

Every thing, meanwhile, announced, that the great foundations of the national character were giving way on all sides; and that the failing literature of the country was only one of the phases and signs of the coming overthrow of its institutions. The decay which was so visible on the surface of things had, however, long mined unseen beneath what had been thought a period of extraordinary security and glory. Charles the Fifth, while, on the one side, by the war of the Comuneros, he had crushed nearly all of political liberty that Cardinal Ximenes had left in the old constitutions of Castile, had given, on the other, by his magnificent foreign conquests, a false direction to the character of his people at home;—both tending alike to waste away that vigor and independence which the Moorish wars had nourished in the hearts of the nation, and which had so long constituted its real strength. Philip the Second had been less successful than his father in his great labors to advance the permanent prosperity of the monarchy. He had, indeed, added Portugal and the Philippine Islands to his empire, which now comprehended above a hundred millions of human beings, and seemed to threaten the interests of all the rest of Europe. But such doubtful benefits were heavily overbalanced by the religious rebellion of the Netherlands, the fatal source of unnumbered mischiefs; by the exhausting wars with Elizabeth of England and Henry the Fourth[p. 200] of France; by the contempt for labor, that followed the extraordinary prevalence of a spirit of military adventure, and broke down the industry of the country; by the vast increase of the ecclesiastical institutions, which created a ruinous amount of pensioned idleness; and by the wasteful luxury brought in with the gold of America, which seemed to corrupt whatever it touched; so that, when that wary prince died, he left an impoverished people, whose energies he had overstrained and impaired by his despotism, and whose character he had warped and misdirected by his unrelenting and unscrupulous bigotry.[262]

His successor, feeble-minded and superstitious, was neither able to repair the results of such mischiefs, nor to contend with the difficulties they entailed upon his country. The power of the clergy, grown enormous by the favor of Philip the Second and the consolidated influence of the Jesuits, continued to gain strength, as it were of itself; and, under the direct persuasions of this mighty hierarchy, nearly six hundred thousand descendants of Moors—who, though preserving, as their fathers had done for a century, the external appearances of Christianity, were yet suspected of being Mohammedans at heart—were now, by a great crime of state, expelled from the land of their birth; a crime followed by injuries to the agriculture and wealth of the South of Spain, and indeed of the whole country, from which they have never recovered.[263]

[p. 201]

The easy, gay selfishness of Philip the Fourth, and the open profligacy of his ministers, gave increased ac[p. 202]tivity to the causes that were hastening on the threatened ruin. Catalonia broke out into rebellion; Jamaica was seized by the English; Roussillon was ceded to France; Portugal, which had never been heartily incorporated into the monarchy, resumed her ancient place among the independent nations of the earth;—every thing, in short, showed how the external relations of the state were disturbed and endangered. Its internal condition, meanwhile, was no less shaken. The coin, notwithstanding the wise warnings of Mariana, had been adulterated anew; the taxes had been shamelessly increased, while the interest on the ever-growing public debt was dishonestly diminished. Men, everywhere, began to be alarmed at the signs of the times. The timid took shelter in celibacy and the institutions of the Church. The bolder emigrated. At last, the universal pressure began to be visible in the state of the population. Whole towns and villages were deserted. Seville, the ancient capital of the monarchy, lost three quarters[p. 203] of its inhabitants; Toledo one third; Segovia, Medina del Campo, and others of the large cities, fell off still more, not only in their numbers and opulence, but in whatever goes to make up the great aggregate of civilization. The whole land, in fact, was impoverished, and was falling into a premature decay.

The necessary results of such a deplorable state of things are yet more apparent in the next reign,—the unhappy reign of Charles the Second,—which began with the troubles incident to a long minority, and ended with a failure in the regular line of succession, and a contest for the throne. It was a dreary period, with marks of dilapidation and ruin on all sides. Beginning at the southern borders of France, and following the coast by Barcelona and Gibraltar round to Cadiz, not one of the great fortresses, which were the keys of the kingdom, was in a state to defend itself against the most moderate force by which it might be assailed. On the Atlantic, the old arsenals, from which the Armada had gone forth, were empty; and the art of ship-building had been so long neglected, that it was almost, or quite lost.[264] And, in the capital and at court, the revenues of the country, which had long been exhausted and anticipated, were at last unable to provide for the common wants of the government, and sometimes even failed to furnish forth the royal table with its accustomed propriety; so that the envoy of Austria expressed his regret at having accepted the place of ambassador at a court where he was compelled to witness a misery so discreditable.[265]

It was a new lesson to the world in the vicissitudes[p. 204] of empire. No country in Christendom had, from such a height of power as that which Spain occupied in the time of Charles the Fifth, fallen into such an abyss of degradation as that in which every proud Spaniard felt Spain to be sunk, when the last of the great House of Austria approached the grave, believing himself to be under the influence of sorcery, and seeking relief by exorcisms which would have disgraced the credulity of the Middle Ages;—all, too, at the time when France was jubilant with the victories of Condé, and England preparing for the age of Marlborough.[266]

In any country, such a decay in the national character and power would be accompanied by a corresponding, if not an equal, decay in its literature; but in Spain, where both had always been so intimately connected, and where both had rested, in such a remarkable degree, on the same foundations, the wise who looked on from a distance could not fail to anticipate a rapid and disastrous decline of all that was intellectual and elegant. And so, in fact, it proved. The old religion of the country,—the most prominent of all the national characteristics,—the mighty impulse which, in the days of the Moors, had done every thing but work miracles,—was now so perverted from its true character by the enormous growth of the intolerance which sprang up originally almost as a virtue, that it had become a means of oppression such as Europe had never before witnessed. Through the whole period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which we have just gone over,[p. 205]—from the fall of Granada to the extinction of the Austrian dynasty,—the Inquisition, as the grand exponent of the power of religion in Spain, had maintained, not only an uninterrupted authority, but, by constantly increasing its relations to the state, and lending itself more and more freely to the punishment of whatever was obnoxious to the government, had effectually broken down all that remained, from earlier days, of intellectual independence and manly freedom. But this was not done, and could not be done, without the assent of the great body of the people, or without such an active coöperation on the part of the government and the higher classes as brought degradation and ruin to all who shared in its spirit.

Unhappily, this spirit, mistaken for the religion that had sustained them through their long-protracted contest with their infidel invaders, was all but universal in Spain during this whole period. The first and the last of the House of Austria,—Charles the Fifth and the feeblest of his descendants,—if alike in nothing else, were alike in the zeal with which they sustained the Holy Office while they lived, and with which, by their testaments, they commended it to the support and veneration of their respective successors.[267] Nor did the intervening kings show less deference to its authority. The first royal act of Philip the Second, when he came from the Low Countries to assume the crown of Spain, was to celebrate an auto da fé at Valladolid.[268] When the young and gay daughter of Henry the Second of France arrived at Toledo, in 1560, that city offered an auto da fé as part of the rejoicings deemed appropriate to her wedding; and the same thing was[p. 206] done by Madrid, in 1632, for another French princess, when she gave birth to an heir to the crown;[269]—odious proofs of the degree to which bigotry had stifled both the dictates of an enlightened reason and the common feelings of humanity.

But in all this the people and their leaders rejoiced. When a nobleman, about to die for adherence to the Protestant faith, passed the balcony where Philip the Second sat in state, and appealed to him not to see his innocent subjects thus cruelly put to death, the monarch replied, that, if it were his own son, he would gladly carry the fagots for his execution; and the answer was received at the time, and recorded afterwards, as one worthy of the head of the mightiest empire in the world.[270] And again, in 1680, when Charles the Second was induced to signify his desire to enjoy, with his young bride, the spectacle of an auto da fé, the artisans of Madrid volunteered in a body to erect the needful amphitheatre, and labored with such enthusiasm, that they completed the vast structure in an incredibly short space of time; cheering one another at their work with devout exhortations, and declaring that, if the materials furnished them should fail, they would pull down their own houses in order to obtain what might be wanting to complete the holy task.[271]

[p. 207]Nor had the principle of loyalty, always so prominent in the Spanish character, become less perverted and mischievous than the religious principle. It offered its sincere homage alike to the cold severity of Philip the Second, to the weak bigotry of Philip the Third, to the luxurious selfishness of Philip the Fourth, and to the miserable imbecility of Charles the Second. The waste and profligacy of such royal favorites as the Duke of Lerma and the Count Duke Olivares, which ended in national bankruptcy and disgrace, failed seriously to affect the sentiments of the people towards the person of the monarch, or to change their persuasions that their earthly sovereign was to be addressed in words and with feelings similar to those with which they approached the Majesty of Heaven.[272] The king—merely because he was the king—was looked upon substantially as he had been in the days of Saint Ferdinand and the “Partidas,” when he was accounted the direct vicegerent of Heaven, and the personal proprietor of all those portions of the globe which he had inherited with his crown.[273] The Duc de Vendôme, therefore, showed his thorough knowledge of the Spanish character, when, in the War of the Succession,—Madrid being in possession of the enemy, and every thing seeming to be lost,[p. 208]—he still declared, that, if the persons of the king, the queen, and the prince were but safe, he would himself answer for final success.[274] In fact, the old principle of loyalty, sunk into a submission—voluntary, it is true, and not without grace, but still an unhesitating submission—to the mere authority of the king, seemed to have become the only efficient bond of connection between the crown and its subjects, and the main resource of the state for the preservation of social order. The nation ceased to claim its most important rights, if they came in conflict with the rights claimed by the royal prerogative; so that the resistance of Aragon in the case of Perez, and that of Catalonia against the oppressive administration of the Count Duke Olivares, were easily put down by the zeal of the very descendants of the Comuneros of Castile.

It is this degradation of the loyalty and religion of the country, infecting as it did every part of the national character, which we have felt to be undermining the general culture of Spain during the seventeenth century; its workings being sometimes visible on the surface, and sometimes hidden by the vast and showy apparatus of despotism and superstition under which it was often concealed even from its victims. But it is a most melancholy fact in the case, that whatever of Spanish literature survived at the end of this period found its nourishment in such feelings of religion and loyalty as still sustained the forms of the monarchy,—an imperfect and unhealthy life, wasting away in an atmosphere of death. At last, as we approach the conclusion of the century, the Inquisition and the despotism seem to be everywhere present, and to have cast their[p. 209] blight over every thing. All the writers of the time yield to their influences, but none in a manner more painful to witness, than Calderon and Solís; the two whose names close up the period, and leave so little to hope for the future. For the “Autos” of Calderon and the “History” of Solís were undoubtedly regarded, both by their authors and by the public, as works eminently religious in their nature; and the respect, and even reverence, with which each of these great men treated the wretched and imbecile Charles the Second, were as undoubtedly accounted to them by their contemporaries for religious loyalty and patriotism. At the present day, we cannot doubt that a literature which rests in any considerable degree on such foundations must be near to its fall.[275]

[p. 210]

Charles the Second was gathered to his fathers on the first day of November, in the year 1700. How low he left the intellectual culture of his country, and how completely the old national literature had died out in his reign, we have already seen. But, before there could be any serious thought of a revival from this disastrous state of things, a civil war was destined to sweep over the land, and still further exhaust its resources. Austria and France, it had been long understood, would make pretensions to the throne of Spain, so soon as it should be left vacant by the extinction of the reigning dynasty; and the partisans of each of these great powers were numerous and confident of success, not only in Spain, but throughout Europe. At this moment, while[p. 214] standing on the verge of the grave,—and knowing that he stood there,—the last, unhappy descendant of the House of Austria, with many misgivings and a heart-felt reluctance, finally announced his preference; and, by a secret political testament, declared the Duke of Anjou, second son of the Dauphin and grandson of Louis the Fourteenth of France, to be sole heir to his throne and dominions.

The decision was not unexpected, and was, perhaps, as wise as a wiser king would have made under similar circumstances. But it was not the more likely, on either account, to be acquiesced in. Austria declared war against the new dynasty, as soon as the will of the deceased monarch was divulged; and England and Holland, outraged by the bad faith of Louis the Fourteenth, who, hardly two years before, had made an arrangement with them for a wholly different settlement of the Spanish question, soon joined her. The war, known as “the War of the Succession,” became general in its character; Spain was invaded by the allied powers; and the contest for its throne was kept up on the soil of that unfortunate country, partly by foreign troops, and partly by divisions among its own people, until 1713, when the treaty of Utrecht confirmed the claims of the Bourbon family, and gave peace to Europe, wearied with blood.

As far as Spain was concerned, the results of this war were most important. On the one hand, she lost by it nearly half of her European dominions, and fell, if not in proportion to such a loss, yet very greatly, in the scale of nations. But, on the other hand, the vast resources of her American colonies still remained untouched; her people had been roused to new energy by their exertions in defence of their homes; and their[p. 215] ancient loyalty had been, to an extraordinary degree, concentrated on a young and adventurous prince, who, though himself a foreigner, stood before them as their defender against foreign invasion. It seemed, therefore, as if still there were life in Spain, and as if something remained of the old national character, on which to build a new culture.[276]

That Philip the Fifth should desire to restore the intellectual dignity of the country, that had so generously adopted him, was natural. But while the war lasted, it demanded all the care of his government; and when it was over, and he turned himself to the task, it was plain that, in his personal relations and dispositions, he was but imperfectly fitted for it. Notwithstanding the sincerest efforts to assimilate himself to the people he governed, he was still a foreigner, little acquainted with their condition, and unable to sympathize with their peculiar nationality. He had been educated at the court of Louis the Fourteenth; the most brilliant court in Europe, and that in which, more than in any other, letters were regarded as a part of the pageant of empire. His character was not strongly marked; and he expressed no decided love for any definite form of intellectual cultivation, though he had good taste enough to enjoy the elegance to which he had always been accustomed, and which had been an important part of his breeding. He was, in fact, a Frenchman; and never could forget,—what his grandfather had unwisely told him always to remember,—that he was such. When, therefore, he desired to encourage elegant literature, it was natural that he should first recur to the means by[p. 216] which he had seen it encouraged where, more than in any other country, it had been successfully fostered by royal patronage; and if, in some respects, his position was little favorable to such a use of his power, in one, at least, it was eminently fortunate; for the earlier literature of Spain had so nearly disappeared, that it could offer little resistance to any attempt that might be made to introduce new forms or to infuse a new character into the old.

At this moment, the idea of patronizing and controlling the literature of a country by academies, established under the authority of its government, and composed of the principal men of letters of the time, was generally favored;—the French Academy, founded by Cardinal Richelieu, and always the model of its class, being now at the height of its success and fame. To establish a Spanish Academy, which should have similar objects and reach similar results, was, therefore, naturally the great literary project of the reign of Philip the Fifth.[277] Probably the king himself had early entertained it. Certainly it was formally brought to his notice, in 1713, by the Marquis of Villena, a nobleman, who, amidst the cares of five successive viceroyalties, had found leisure to devote himself, not only to letters, but to some of the more severe branches of the physical and exact sciences. His first purpose seems to have been, to form an academy whose empire should extend, on all sides, to the limits of human knowledge, and whose subdivisions should be substantially made according to the system of Lord Bacon. This, however, was soon abandoned as too vast an undertaking; and it was deter[p. 217]mined to begin by confining the duties of the new association principally to “the cultivation and establishment of the purity of the Castilian language.” An Academy for this object went into operation, by virtue of a royal decree dated the 3d of November, 1714.[278]

As it was modelled almost exactly after the form of the French Academy, the first project of its members was that of making a Dictionary. The work was much needed. From the time of Fernando de Herrera the language had not received large additions, but it had received some that were of value. Mendoza and Coloma had introduced a few military terms, that have since passed into common use; and both of them, with Ercilla, Urrea, and many others, had been so familiar with the Italian, as to seize some of its wealth for their own. Cervantes, however, had, perhaps, done more than any body else. That he was insensible neither to the danger of a too free intermixture of foreign words, nor to the true principles that should govern their introduction when needed, he has shown in the conversations of Don Quixote with the printers at Barcelona, and with Sancho at the Duke’s castle; but still he felt the rights of genius within him, and exercised them in this respect as boldly as he did in most others. His new compounds, his Latinisms, his restoration of old and neglected phrases, and his occasional recourse to the Italian, have all been noted; and, in nearly every instance, the words he adopted now enter into the recognized vocabulary of the language. Other writers ventured in the same direction, with less success; but still, from the glossaries added to the poems of Blasco in 1584,[p. 218] and of Lopez Pinciano in 1605, there can be no doubt that many words, which were then thought to need explanation, have long since become familiar, and that the old Castilian stock, during the reigns of Philip the Second and Philip the Third, was receiving additions, which ought, in some way, to be recognized as an important part of its permanent resources.[279]

But, on the other hand, during the seventeenth century, the old language had been much abused. From the appearance of Góngora no proper regard had been paid to the preservation of its purity or of its original characteristics, by many of the most popular authors that employed it. The Latiniparla, as Quevedo called the affectation of his time, had brought in many Latin words and many strange phrases, wholly repugnant to the genius of the Spanish. Such words and constructions, too, had enjoyed much favor; and Lope de Vega, Calderon, and the other leading spirits, who pronounced them to be affectations and refused directly to countenance them, yet occasionally yielded to the fashion of their time, in order to obtain the applause which was sure to follow.[280]

[p. 219]

Both to receive the words that had been rightfully naturalized in the language, and to place a mark of disapprobation on those that were unworthy to be adopted, a Dictionary resting on authority was wanted. None such had been attempted in Spain. Indeed, during the whole of the preceding century, only one Spanish Dictionary of any kind had been produced that received, or deserved, the notice of the Academy. This was the work of Covarrubias, whose “Tesoro,” first printed in 1611, is a curious book, full of learning, and, in the etymological part, valuable, but often conceited, and rarely showing philosophical acuteness in its definitions.[281] The new Academy, therefore, could obtain little help from the labors of their predecessors, and, for such as was worth having, were obliged to go back to Lebrixa and his editors. But they were in earnest. They labored diligently, and between 1726 and 1739 produced their grand work, in six folio volumes. On the whole, it did them honor. No doubt, it shows, in several parts, a want of mature consideration and good judgment. Many words were omitted, that should have been inserted; many were inserted, which were afterwards stricken out; and many were given on unsatisfactory authorities. But its definitions are generally good; its etymologies—though this part of the work was little regarded by its authors—are respectable; and its citations are ample and pertinent. In fact, all that had been done for the language, in the way of dictionaries, since its origin, was not equal to what was now done in this single work.

But the Academicians were not slow to perceive, that[p. 220] a Dictionary so large could exercise little popular influence. They began, therefore, soon afterwards, to prepare an abridgment, in a single folio volume, for more general use, and published the first edition of it in 1780. The project was judicious, and its execution skilful. It omitted the discussions, citations, and formal etymologies of the larger work; but it established a better vocabulary, and improved many of the old definitions. It had, therefore, from its first appearance, a decided authority; and, by the persevering labors of the Academy, has continued, in its successive editions, to be the proper standard of the language,—labors which, since the latter part of the eighteenth century, have been always heavy, and sometimes disagreeable, from the constant tendency of even the better writers, like Melendez and his school, to fall into Gallicisms, which the increasing intercourse with France had rendered fashionable in the society of their time.

Another difficulty, however, soon presented itself to the Academy, quite as serious as the size of their Dictionary. It was that of the orthography they had adopted. The spelling of the Castilian—partly, perhaps, from the very various elements of which it was composed, and partly from the popular character of its literature—had always been more unsettled than that of the other modern languages. Lebrixa, the great scholar of the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, first attempted to reduce it to order, and the simplicity of his system, which appeared in 1517, seemed at first likely to secure general favor and acceptance. But thirty treatises, that at different times followed, had—with the exception of the acute and pleasant one printed by Aleman when he was in Mexico, in 1609—served[p. 221] rather to unsettle and confuse the whole matter, than to determine any thing in relation to it.[282]

It is not surprising, therefore, that the first attempt of the Academy, made in the form of a short discourse, prefixed to its larger Dictionary, produced little effect. A separate work, which appeared in 1742, did something more, but not much; and the successive editions of it which were called for by the public rather showed the uneasy state of opinion in relation to the points under discussion, than any thing else. At last, in 1815, the Academy, in the eighth recension of its treatise on Orthography, and in 1817, in the fifth of its smaller Dictionary, began a series of important changes, which have been generally adopted by subsequent writers of authority, and appear to have nearly settled the spelling of the Castilian, though still it seems open to a few further modifications, and even to invite them.[283]

A Grammar, like a Dictionary, was provided for in[p. 222] the statutes of the Academy. But the original members of that body, few of whom were men of note and authority, showed a marked unwillingness to approach the difficult discussions involved in such a work, and did not undertake them at all till 1740. Even then, they went on slowly and with anxiety; so that the result of their labors did not appear till 1771. For this delay they were not wholly in fault. They had little to guide them, except the rival Grammars of Gayoso and San Pedro, which were published while the Academy was preparing its own, and the original attempt of Lebrixa, which had long been forgotten. But, after so protracted a labor, the Academicians should have produced something more worthy of their claims; for what they gave to the world, at last, was an unphilosophical and unpractical work, which, though subjected to frequent revision since, is hardly an outline of what it ought to be, and quite inferior to the Grammar of Salvá.[284]

A History of the Castilian Language, and an Art of Poetry, which were also expressly prescribed by the statutes of the Academy, have never been prepared under their authority; but, instead of these tasks, they have sometimes performed duties not originally imposed upon them. Thus they have published careful editions[p. 223] of different works of recognized authority, particularly a magnificent one of “Don Quixote,” in 1780-84. Since 1777, they have, from time to time, offered prizes for poetical compositions, though, as is usual in such cases, with less important results than had been hoped. And occasionally they have printed, with funds granted to them by the government, works deemed of sufficient merit to deserve such patronage, and, among others, the excellent treatise of Garcés on “The Vigor and Beauty of the Spanish Language,” which appeared under their auspices in 1791.[285] During the whole century, therefore, the Spanish Academy, occupied in these various ways, continued to be a useful institution, carefully abstaining from such claims to control the public taste as were at first made by its model in France, and, though not always very active and efficient, still never deserving the reproach of neglecting the duties and tasks for which it was originally instituted.

One good effect that followed from the foundation of the Spanish Academy was the establishment of other academies for kindred purposes. These academies were entirely different from the social meetings, under the same name, that were imitated from the Italian academies in the time of Charles the Fifth,—one of the earliest of which was held in the house of Cortés,[286] the conqueror of Mexico;—though still the elder associations seem sometimes to have furnished materials, out of which the institutions that succeeded them were constructed. At least, this was the case with the Acade[p. 224]my of Barcelona, which has rendered good service to the cause of letters since 1751, after having long existed as an idle affectation, under the title of the “Academy of the Diffident.” The only one, however, of any consequence to the general literature of the country, was established during the reign of Philip the Fifth,—the Academy for Spanish History, founded in 1738; the character and amount of whose labors, both published and unpublished, do its members much honor.[287]

But such associations everywhere, though they may be useful and even important in their proper relations, can neither create a new literature for a country, nor, where the old literature is seriously decayed, do much to revive it. The Spanish academies were no exceptions to this remark. All elegant culture had so nearly disappeared before the accession of the Bourbons, and there was such an insensibility to its value in those classes of society where it should have been most cherished, that it was plain the resuscitation must be the work of time, and that the land must long lie fallow before another harvest could be gathered in. During the entire reign of Philip the Fifth, therefore,—a reign which, including the few months of his nominal abdication in favor of his son, extends to forty-six years,—we shall find undeniable traces of this unhappy state of things; few authors appearing who deserve to be named at all, and still fewer who demand a careful notice.

Poetry, indeed, or what passed under that name, continued to be written; and some of it, though little en[p. 225]couraged by the general regard of the nation, was printed. Moraes, a Portuguese gentleman of rank, who had lived in Spain from his youth, wrote two heroic poems in Spanish; the first on the discovery of “The New World,” which he published in 1701, and the other on the foundation of the kingdom of Portugal, which was printed in 1712; both appearing originally in an unfinished state, in consequence of the author’s impatience for fame, and the earlier of them still remaining so. But they have been long forgotten. Indeed, the first, which is full of extravagant allegories, soon found the fate which its author felt it deserved; and the other, though written with great deference for the rules of art, and more than once reprinted, has not at last enjoyed a better fortune.

The most amusing work of Moraes is a prose satire, printed in 1734, called “The Caves of Salamanca,” where, in certain grottos, which a popular tradition supposed to exist, sealed up by magic, within the banks of the Tórmes, he finds Amadis of Gaul, Oriana, and Celestina, and discourses with them and other fanciful personages on such subjects as his humor happens to suggest. Parts of it are very wild; parts of it are both amusing and wise, especially what is said about the Spanish language and academies, and about the “Telemachus” of Fénelon, then at the height of its fame. The whole shows few of the affectations of style that still deformed and degraded whatever there was of literature in the country, and which, though ridiculed in “The Caves of Salamanca,” are abundant in the other works of the same author.[288]

[p. 226]

A long heroic poem, in two parts, in honor of the conquest of Peru by the Pizarros, was printed at Lima in 1732. It is founded principally on the prose History of the Inca Garcilasso, but is rarely so interesting as the gossip out of which it was constructed. The author, Pedro de Barnuevo, was an officer of the Spanish government in South America; and he gives in the Preface a long list of his works, published and unpublished. He was, undoubtedly, a man of learning, but not a poet. Like Moraes, he has arranged a mystical interpretation to his story; some parts of which, such as that where America comes before God, and prays to be conquered that she may be converted, are really allegorical; while, in general, the interpretation he gives is merely an after-thought, forced and unnatural. But his work is dull and in bad taste, and the octave stanzas in which it is written are managed with less skill than usual.[289]

Several religious poems belong to the same period. One by Pedro de Reynosa, printed in 1727, is on “Santa Casilda,” the converted daughter of a Moorish king of Toledo, who figures in the history of Spain during the eleventh century. Another, called “The Eloquence of Silence,” by Miguel de Zevallos, in 1738, is devoted to the honor of Saint John of Nepomuck, who, in the fourteenth century, was thrown into the Moldau, by order of a king of Bohemia, because the holy man would[p. 227] not reveal to the jealous monarch what the queen had intrusted to him under the seal of the confessional. Both are in the octave stanzas common to such poems, and are full of the faults of their times. Two mock-heroic poems, that naturally followed such attempts, are not better than the serious poems which provoked them.[290]

No account more favorable can be given of the lyric and miscellaneous poetry of the period, than of the narrative. The best that appeared, or at least what was thought to be the best at the time, is to be found in the poetical works of Eugenio Lobo, first printed in 1738. He was a soldier, who wrote verses only for his amusement; but his friends, who admired them much beyond their merit, printed portions of them, from time to time, until, at last, he himself thought it better to permit a religious congregation to publish the whole in a volume. They are very various in form, from fragments of two epics down to sonnets, and equally various in tone, from that appropriate to religious villancicos to that of the freest satire. But they are in very bad taste; and, if any thing like poetry appears in them, it is at rare intervals. Benegasi y Luxan, who, in 1743, published a volume of such light verses as were called for by the gay society in which he lived, wrote in a simpler style than Lobo, though, on the whole, he succeeded no bet[p. 228]ter. But, except these two, and a few who imitated them, such as Alvarez de Toledo and Antonio Muñoz, we have nothing from the reign of the first of the Bourbons, that can claim notice in either of the forms of poetry we have thus far examined.[291]

More characteristic than either, however, were two collections of verse, written, as their titles profess, by the poets of most note at the time, in honor of the king and queen, who, in 1722, meeting the Host, as it was passing to a dying man, gave their own carriage to the priest who bore it, and then, according to the fashion of the country, followed reverently on foot. The names of Zamora the dramatist, of Diego de Torres, well known for his various accomplishments in science and letters, and of a few other poets, who are still remembered, occur in the first collection; but, in general, the obscurity of the authors who contributed to it is such as we might anticipate from reading their poetry; while, at the same time, the occasion of the whole shows how low was the culture which could attribute any value to such publications.[292]

A single bright spot in the poetical history of this period is only the more remarkable from the gloom that surrounds it. It is a satire attributed to Herbas, a person otherwise unknown, who disguised himself un[p. 229]der the name of Jorge de Pitillas, and printed it in a literary journal. It was singularly successful for the time when it appeared; a circumstance the more to be noticed, as this success seems not to have inspired any similar attempt, or even to have encouraged the author to venture again before the public. The subject he chose was fortunate,—the bad writers of his age,—and in discussing it he has spoken out boldly and manfully; sometimes calling by name those whom he ridicules, and at other times indicating them so that they cannot be mistaken. His chief merits are the ease and simplicity of his style, the pungency and justness of his satire, and his agreeable imitations of the old masters, especially Persius and Juvenal, whom he further resembled in the commendable qualities of brevity and sententiousness.[293]

One historical work of some consequence belongs entirely to the reign of Philip the Fifth,—the commentaries on the War of the Succession, and the history of the country from 1701 to 1725, by the Marquis of San Phelipe. Its author, a gentleman of Spanish descent, was born in Sardinia, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and early filled several offices of consequence under the government of Spain; but, when his native island was conquered by the Austrian party, he remained faithful to the French family, under whom he had thus far served, and made his escape to Madrid. There Philip the Fifth received him with great favor. He was created Marquis of San Phelipe,—a title chosen by himself in compliment to the king,—and, besides being much employed during the war in military affairs, he was sent afterwards as ambassador, first to Genoa, and then to the Hague, where he died, on the 1st of July, 1726.

In his youth the Marquis of San Phelipe had been educated with care, and therefore, during the active portions of his life, found an agreeable resource in intellectual occupations. He wrote a poem in octave stanzas on the story in the “Book of Tobit,” which was printed in 1709, and a history of “The Hebrew Monarchy,” taken[p. 231] from the Bible and Josephus, which did not appear till 1727, the year after his death. But his chief work was on the War of the Succession. The great interest he took in the Bourbon cause induced him to write it, and the position he had occupied in the affairs of his time gave him ample materials, quite beyond the reach of others less favored. He called it “Commentaries on the War of Spain, and History of its King, Philip the Fifth, the Courageous, from the Beginning of his Reign to the Year 1725”; but, although the compliment to his sovereign implied on the title-page is faithfully carried through the whole narrative, the book was not published without difficulty. The first volume, in folio, after being printed at Madrid, was suppressed by order of the king, out of regard to the honor of certain Spanish families that show to little advantage in the troublesome times it records; so that the earliest complete edition appeared at Genoa without date, but probably in 1729.

It is a spirited book, earnest in the cause of Castile against Catalonia; but still, notwithstanding its partisan character, it is, the most valuable of the contemporary accounts of the events to which it relates; and, notwithstanding it has a good deal of the lively air of the French memoirs, then so much in fashion, it is strongly marked with the old Spanish feelings of religion and loyalty,—feelings which this very book proves to have partly survived the general decay of the national character during the seventeenth century, and the convulsions that had shaken it at the opening of the eighteenth. In style it is not perfectly pure. Perhaps tokens of its author’s Sardinian education are seen in his choice of words; and certainly his pointed epigrammatic phrases and sentences often show, that he leaned to the rhetori[p. 232]cal doctrines of Gracian, of whom, in his narrative poem, we see that he had once been a thorough disciple. But the Commentaries are, after all, a pleasant book, and abound in details, given with much modesty where their author is personally concerned, and with a picturesqueness which belongs only to the narrative of one who has been an actor in the scenes he describes.[294]

But, when we speak of Spanish literature in the reign of Philip the Fifth, we must never forget that the influence of France was gradually becoming felt in all the culture of the country. The mass of the people, it is true, either took no cognizance of the coming change, or resisted it; and the new government willingly avoided whatever might seem to offend or undervalue the old Castilian spirit. But Paris was then, as it had long been, the most refined capital in Europe; and the courts of Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth, necessarily in intimate relations with that of Philip the Fifth, could not fail to carry to Madrid a tone which was already spreading of itself into Germany and the extreme North.

French, in fact, soon began to be spoken in the elegant society of the capital and the court;—a thing before unknown in Spain, though French princesses had more than once sat on the Spanish throne. But now it was a compliment to the reigning monarch himself, and courtiers strove to indulge in it. Pitillas, under pretence of laughing at himself for following the[p. 233] fashion, ridicules the awkwardness of those who did so, when he says,

And Father Isla makes himself merry with the idea of a man who fancies he has married an Andalusian or Castilian wife, and finds out that she proves little better than a Frenchwoman after all.[295]

Translations from the French followed this state of things; and, at last, an attempt was made to introduce formally into Spain a poetical system founded on the critical doctrines prevalent in France. Its author, Ignacio de Luzan, a gentleman of Aragon, was born in 1702; and, while still a child, went to Italy and received a learned education in the schools of Milan, Palermo, and Naples; remaining abroad eighteen years, and enjoying the society of several of the most distinguished Italian poets of the time, among whom were Maffei and Metastasio. At last, in 1733, he returned to Spain, a well-bred scholar, according to the ideas of scholarship then prevalent in Italy, and with a singular facility in writing and speaking French and Italian.

His personal affairs and his native modesty kept him for some time in retirement on the estates of his family in Aragon. But, in the condition to which Spanish literature was then reduced, a man of so many accomplishments could hardly fail, in any position, to make his influence felt. That of Luzan soon became perceptible, because he loved to write, and wrote a great deal.[p. 234] In Italy and Sicily he had published, not only Italian poetry of his own, but French. In his native language and at home, he naturally went further. He translated from Anacreon, Sappho, and Musæus; he fitted dramas of Maffei, La Chaussée, and Metastasio to the Spanish stage; and he wrote a considerable number of short poems, and one original drama, “Virtue Honored,” which was privately represented in Saragossa.

Whatever he did was well received, but little of it was published at the time, and not much has appeared since. His “Odes on the Conquest of Oran” were particularly admired by his friends, and, though somewhat cold, may still be read with pleasure. These and other compositions made him known to the government at Madrid, and procured for him, in 1747, the appointment of Secretary to the Spanish embassy at Paris. There he remained three years, and, from the absence of the ambassador, acted, for a large part of the time, as the only representative of his country at the French court. On his return home, he continued to enjoy the confidence of the king; and when he died suddenly, in 1754, he was in great favor, and about to receive a place of more consequence than any he had yet held.[296]

The circumstances of the country, and those of his own education, position, and tastes, opened to Luzan, as a critic, a career of almost assured success. Every thing was so enfeebled and degraded, that it could offer no[p. 235] effectual resistance to what he might teach. The political importance of his country among the nations of Europe had been crushed. Its moral dignity was impaired. Its school of poetry had disappeared. The old system of things in Spain, as far as poetical culture was concerned, had passed away, no less than the Austrian dynasty, with which it had come in; and no attempt deserving the name had yet been made to determine what should be the intellectual character of the system that should follow it. A small effort, under such circumstances, would go far towards imparting a decisive movement; and, in literary taste and criticism, Luzan was certainly well fitted to give the guiding impulse. He had been educated with great thoroughness in the principles of the classical French school, and he possessed all the learning necessary to make known and support its peculiar doctrines. In 1728, he had offered to the Academy at Palermo, of which he was a member, six critical discussions on poetry, written in Italian; so that, when he returned to Spain, he had only to take these papers and work them into a formal treatise, suited to what he deemed the pressing wants of the country. He did so;—and the result was his “Art of Poetry,” the first edition of which appeared in 1737.

The attempt was by no means a new one. The rules and doctrines of the ancients, in matters of taste and rhetoric, had frequently before been announced and defended in Spain. Even Enzina, the oldest of those who regarded Castilian poetry as an art, was not ignorant of Quintilian and Cicero, though, in his short treatise, which shows more good sense and good taste than can be claimed from the age, he takes substantially the same view of his subject that the Marquis of Villena and the Provençals had taken before him,—considering all[p. 236] poetry chiefly with reference to its mechanical forms.[297] Rengifo, a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, whose “Spanish Art of Poetry” dates from 1592, confines himself almost entirely to the structure of the verse and the technical forms known both to the elder Castilian style of composition and to the Italian introduced by Boscan;—a curious discussion, in which the authority of the ancients is by no means forgotten, but one whose chief value consists in what it contains relating to the national school and its peculiar measures.[298]

Alonso Lopez, commonly called El Pinciano,—the same person who wrote the dull epic on Pelayo,—went further, and in 1596 published his “Ancient Poetical Philosophy,” in which, under the disguise of a friendly correspondence, he gives, with much learning and some acuteness, his own views of the opinions of the ancient masters on all the modes of poetical composition.[299] Cascales followed him, in 1616, with a series of dialogues, somewhat more familiar than the grave letters of Lopez, and resting more on the doctrines of Horace, whose epistle to the Pisos he afterwards published, with a well-written Latin commentary.[300] Salas, on the contrary, in his “New Idea of Ancient Tragedy,” which appeared in 1633, followed Aristotle rather than any other authority, and illustrated his discussion—which is the ablest in Spanish literature on the side it sustains—by a translation of the “Trojanæ” of Seneca,[p. 237] and an address of the theatre of all ages to its various audiences.[301]

All these works, however, and three or four others of less consequence, assumed, so far as they attempted to lay their foundations in philosophy, to be built on the rules laid down by Aristotle or the Roman rhetoricians.[302] In this they committed a serious error. Ancient rhetoric can be applied, in all its strictness, to no modern poetry, and least of all to the poetry of Spain. The school of Lope de Vega, therefore, passed over them like an irresistible flood, leaving behind it hardly a trace of the structures that had been raised to oppose its progress. But Luzan took a different ground. His more immediate predecessors had been Gracian, who defended the Gongorism of the preceding period, and Artiga, who, in a long treatise “On Spanish Eloquence,” written in the ballad measures, had seemed willing to encourage all the bad taste that prevailed in the beginning of the eighteenth century.[303]

Luzan took no notice of either of them. He followed the poetical system of Boileau and Lebossu, not, indeed, forgetting the masters of antiquity, but everywhere accommodating his doctrines to the demands of modern poetry, as Muratori had done just before him, and enforcing them by the example of the French school, then[p. 238] more admired than any other in Europe.[304] His object, as he afterwards explained it, was “to bring Spanish poetry under the control of those precepts which are observed among polished nations”; and his work is arranged with judgment to effect his purpose. The first book treats of the origin and nature of poetry, and the second, of the pleasure and advantage poetry brings with it. These two books constitute one half of the work, and having gone through in them what he thinks it necessary to say of the less important divisions of the art,—such as lyric poetry, satire, and pastorals,—he devotes the two remaining books entirely to a discussion of the drama and of epic poetry,—the forms in which Spanish genius had long been more ambitious of excellence than in any other. A strict method reigns through the whole; and the style, if less rich than is found in the older prose-writers, and less so than the genius of the language demands, is clear, simple, and effective. In explaining and defending his system of opinions, he shows judgment, and a temperate philosophy; and his abundant illustrations, drawn not only from the Castilian, the French, the Greek, and the Latin, but from the Italian and the Portuguese, are selected with excellent taste, and applied skilfully to strengthen his general argument and design. For its purpose, a better treatise could hardly have been produced.

The effect was immediate and great. It seemed to offer a remedy for the bad taste which had accompanied, and in no small degree hastened, the decline of the[p. 239] national literature from the time of Góngora. It was seized on, therefore, with eagerness, as the book that was wanted; and when to this we add that the literature of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, which it held up as the model literature of Christendom, was then regarded throughout Europe with almost unmingled admiration, we shall not be surprised that the “Poética” of Luzan exercised, from its first appearance, a controlling authority over opinion at the court of Spain, and over the few writers of reputation then to be found in the country.[305]

Something more, however, than a reformation in taste was wanted in Spain before a sufficient foundation could be laid for advancement in elegant literature. The commonest forms of truth had been so long excluded from the country, that the human mind there seemed to have pined away, and to have become dwarfed, for want of its appropriate nourishment. All the great sciences, both moral and physical, that had been for a hundred years advancing with an accelerated speed everywhere else throughout Europe, had been unable to force their way through the jealous guard which ecclesiastical and political despotism had joined to keep for ever watching the passes of the Pyrenees. From the days of the Comuneros and the Reformation of Luther, when religious sects began to discuss the authority of princes and the[p. 240] rights of the people, and when the punishment of opinion became the settled policy of the Spanish state, every thing in the shape of instruction that was not approved by the Church was treated as dangerous. At the universities, which from their foundation had been entirely ecclesiastical corporations, and were used constantly to build up ecclesiastical influences, no elegant learning was fostered, and very little tolerated, except such as furnished means to form scholastic Churchmen and faithful Catholics; the physical and exact sciences were carefully excluded and forbidden, except so far as they could be taught on the authority of Aristotle; and, as Jovellanos said boldly in a memorial on the subject to Charles the Fourth, “even medicine and jurisprudence would have been neglected, if the instincts of men had permitted them to forget the means by which life and property are protected.”[306]

The Spanish universities, in fact, still taught from the same books they had used in the time of Cardinal Ximenes, and by the same methods. The scholastic philosophy was still regarded as the highest form of merely intellectual culture. Diego de Torres, afterwards distinguished for his knowledge in the physical sciences,—a man born and educated at Salamanca in the first half of the century,—says, that, after he had been five years in one of the schools of the University there, it was by accident he learned the existence of the mathematical sciences.[307] And, fifty years later, Blanco White declares, that, like most of his countrymen, he should have completed his studies in theology at the University of[p. 241] Seville without so much as hearing of elegant literature, if he had not chanced to make the acquaintance of a person who introduced him to a partial knowledge of Spanish poetry.[308]

Thus far, therefore, the old system of things was triumphant, and the common forms of advancing knowledge were, to an extraordinary and almost incredible degree, kept out of the country. On the other hand, errors, follies, and absurdities sprang up and abounded, just as surely as darkness follows the exclusion of light. Few persons in Spain in the beginning of the eighteenth century were so well informed as not to believe in astrology, and fewer still doubted the disastrous influence of comets and eclipses. The system of Copernicus was not only discouraged, but forbidden to be taught, on the ground that it was contrary to Scripture. The philosophy of Bacon, with all the consequences that had followed it, was unknown. It was not, perhaps, true, that the healing waters of knowledge had been rolled backward to their fountain, but no spirit of power had descended to trouble them, and they had now been kept stagnant till life was no longer in them and life could no longer be supported by them. It seemed as if the faculties of thinking and reasoning, in the better sense of these words, were either about to be entirely lost in Spain, or to be partly preserved only in a few scattered individuals, who, by the civil and ecclesiastical tyranny that oppressed them, would be prevented from diffusing even the imperfect light which they themselves enjoyed.

But it could not be so. The human mind cannot be permanently imprisoned; and it is an obvious proof of this consoling fact, that the intellectual emancipation of[p. 242] Spain was begun by a man of no extraordinary gifts, and one whose position gave him no extraordinary advantages for the undertaking to which he devoted his life,—the quiet monk, Benito Feyjoó. He was born in 1676, the eldest son of respectable parents in the northwestern part of Spain, who, contrary to the opinions of their time, did not think the law of primogeniture required them to devote their first-born wholly to the duty of sustaining the honors of his family and enjoying the income of the estates he was to inherit. At the age of fourteen, his destination to the Church was determined upon; but he loved study of all kinds, and applied himself, not only to theology, but to the physical sciences and to medicine, so far as means were allowed him in the low state to which all intellectual culture was then sunk. As early as 1717, he established himself in a Benedictine convent at Oviedo, and lived there forty-seven years in as strict a retirement as his duties permitted, occupied only with his studies, and relying almost entirely on the press as the means of enlightening his countrymen.

His personal character and resources, in some respects, fitted him well for the great task he had undertaken. He was a sincere Catholic, and therefore felt no disposition to interfere even with abuses that were protected by the authority of his Church; a circumstance without which he would have been stopped at the very threshold of his enterprise. His mind was strong and patient of labor; and if, on the one hand, his researches were restrained by the embarrassments of his ecclesiastical position, he had, on the other, obtained, what few Spaniards then enjoyed, the means of knowing much of what had been done in Italy, in France, and even in England, for the advancement of[p. 243] science during the century preceding that in which he was educated. Above all, he was honest, and seriously devoted to his work. But, as he advanced, he was shocked to find how wide a gulf separated his own country from the rest of Europe. Truth, he saw, had, on many important subjects, been so completely excluded from Spain, that its very existence was hardly suspected; and that, while Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Calderon and Quevedo, had been rioting unrestrained in the world of imagination, the solemn world of reality,—the world of moral and physical truth,—had been as much closed against inquiry as if his country had been no part of civilized Europe.

At times he seems to have been anxious concerning the result of his labors; but, on the whole, his courage did not fail him. He was not, indeed, a man of genius. He was not a man to invent new systems of metaphysics or philosophy. But he was a learned man, with a cautious judgment, somewhat obscured, but not really impaired, by religious prejudices, from which he could not be expected to emancipate himself; he was a man who understood the real importance of the labors of Galileo, Bacon, and Newton, of Leibnitz, Pascal, and Gassendi; and, what was of vastly more consequence, he was determined that his own countrymen should no longer remain ignorant of the advancement already made by the rest of Christendom under the influence of master-spirits like these.

So far as the War of the Succession had served to rouse the national character from its lethargy, and to direct the thoughts of Spaniards to what had been done beyond the Pyrenees, it was favorable to his purpose. But in other respects, as we have seen, it had effected nothing for the national culture. Still, when, in 1726,[p. 244] Feyjoó printed a volume of essays connected with his main purpose, he was able to command public attention, and was encouraged to go on. He called it “The Critical Theatre”; and in its different dissertations,—as separate as the papers in “The Spectator,” but longer and on graver subjects,—he boldly attacked the dialectics and metaphysics then taught everywhere in Spain; maintained Bacon’s system of induction in the physical sciences; ridiculed the general opinion in relation to comets, eclipses, and the arts of magic and divination; laid down rules for historical faith, which would exclude most of the early traditions of the country; showed a greater deference for woman, and claimed for her a higher place in society, than the influence of the Spanish Church willingly permitted her to occupy; and, in all respects, came forth to his countrymen as one urging earnestly the pursuit of truth and the improvement of social life. Eight volumes of this stirring work were published before 1739, and then it stopped, without any apparent reason. But in 1742 Feyjoó began a similar series of discussions, under the name of “Learned and Inquiring Letters,” which he finished in 1760, with the fifth volume, thus closing up the long series of his truly philanthropical, as well as philosophical, labors.

Of course he was assailed. A work, called the “Antiteatro Crítico,” appeared early, and was soon followed by another, with nearly the same title, and by not a few scattered tracts and volumes, directed against different portions of what he had published. But he was quite able to defend himself. He wrote with clearness and good taste in an age when the prevailing style was obscure and affected; and, if he fell occasionally into Gallicisms, from relying much on French writers for his materials, his mistakes of this sort were rare; and, in[p. 245] general, he presented himself in a Castilian costume, that was respectable and attractive. Nor was he without wit, which his prudence taught him to use sparingly, and he had always the energy which belongs to good sense and practical wisdom; a union of qualities not often found anywhere, and certainly of most rare occurrence in cloisters like those in which Feyjoó passed his long life.

The attacks made on him, therefore, served chiefly to draw to his works the attention he solicited, and in the end advanced his cause, instead of retarding it. Even the Inquisition, to which he was more than once denounced, summoned him in vain before its tribunals.[309] His faith could not be questioned, and his cause was stronger than they were. Fifteen editions of his principal work, large as it was, were printed in half a century. The excitement it produced went on increasing as long as he lived; and when he died, in 1764, he could look back and see that he had imparted a movement to the human mind in Spain, which, though it was far from raising Spanish philosophy to a level with that of France and England, had yet given it a right direction, and done more for the intellectual life of his country than had been done for a century.[310]

It can hardly be said, that, during the forty-six years of the reign of Philip the Fifth, the intolerance which had so long blighted the land relaxed its grasp. The progress of knowledge might, indeed, be gradually and silently accumulating means to resist it, but its power was still unbroken, and its activity as formidable as ever. Louis the Fourteenth, in whom an old age of bigotry naturally ended a life of selfish indulgence, had counselled his grandson to sustain the Inquisition, as one of the means for insuring tranquillity to the political government of the country; and this advice, not given without a knowledge of the Spanish character, was, on the whole, acted upon with success, if not with entire consistency.

At first, indeed, the personal dispositions of the king in relation to this mighty engine of state seemed somewhat unsettled. When it was proposed to him to celebrate an auto da fé, as a part of the pageant suitable to the coming in of a new dynasty, the young monarch, fresh from the elegance of the court of Versailles, refused to sanction its barbarities by his presence. Even later he encouraged Macanaz, a person high in office, to publish a work in defence of the crown against the[p. 247] overgrown pretensions of the Church, and at one time he went so far as to entertain a project for suspending the Holy Office, or suppressing it altogether.[311]

But these dispositions were transient. The Spanish priesthood early obtained control of the king’s mind. In one of the sieges of Barcelona, during the War of the Succession, he was induced to consult an image of the Virgin, and to avow afterwards, very solemnly, that she had given him a miraculous promise of the fidelity of the Catalonians,—a promise, it should be added, such as would be likely to insure its own fulfilment. The death of the queen, in 1714, which plunged him into a deep melancholy, further contributed to give power to the clergy who surrounded him; and, a year afterwards, when the Inquisition took firm ground against Macanaz and the royal prerogative, the king yielded, and Macanaz fled to France. And finally, when, in 1724, after a few months of abdication, Philip resumed the reins of government, which he should never have laid down, no small part of the increased energy, with which he fulfilled the duties of his high place, was inspired by the influence of the Church. As he grew older, he grew more bigoted; and in his last years, when the accumulated power placed in his hands by the destruction of the few remaining privileges of Aragon and Catalonia had made him a more absolute monarch than ever before sat on the Spanish throne, he seemed to rejoice, as much as any of his predecessors, in devoting the whole of his prerogatives to advance the interests of the priesthood.[312]

But, from first to last, there was no real relaxation in[p. 248] the intolerance of the Church. The fires of the Inquisition had burnt as if Philip the Second were on the throne. At least one auto da fé was celebrated annually in each of the seventeen tribunals into which the country was divided; so that the entire number of these atrocious popular exhibitions of bigotry during the reign of Philip the Fifth exceeded seven hundred and eighty. How many persons were burnt alive in them is not exactly known; but it is believed, that there were more than a thousand, and that at least twelve times that number were, in different ways, subjected to public punishments and disgrace. Judaism, which had penetrated anew into Spain, from the period of the conquest of Portugal, was the great crime, to be hunted down with all the ingenuity of persecution; and undoubtedly all that could be found of the Hebrew nation or faith was now for the second time extirpated, as nearly as it is possible to extirpate what conscience refuses to give up, and fear and hatred have so many ways to hide. But some men of letters—like Belando, who wrote a civil history of part of the reign of Philip the Fifth, which he dedicated to that monarch, and which bore on its pages all the regular permissions to be printed—were punished without the pretence of being guilty of heresy or unbelief; and many more disappeared from society, who, like Macanaz, were known to entertain political opinions offensive to the Church or the government, but of whom nothing else was known that could render them obnoxious to censure. On the whole, therefore, down to the death of Philip the Fifth, the old alliance between the government of the state and the power of the Church—an alliance supported by the general assent of the people—must still be assumed to have continued unbroken, and its authority must still[p. 249] be felt to have been sufficient to control all freedom of discussion, and effectually to check and silence such intellectual activity as it deemed dangerous.[313]

In the reign of Ferdinand the Sixth, which lasted thirteen years, and ended in 1759, there is evidently an improvement in this state of things. The seeds sown in the time of his father, if less cared for and cultivated than they should have been, were beginning to germinate and disencumber themselves from the cold and hard soil into which they had been cast. Foreign intercourse, especially that with France, brought in new ideas. Ferreras, the careful, but dull, annalist of his country’s history; Juan de Yriarte, the active head of the Royal Library; Bayer, his learned successor; Mayans, who had a passion for collecting and editing books; and, above all, the wise and modest Father Feyjoó, had not labored in vain, and still survived to see the results of their toils.

The Church itself began slowly to acknowledge the irresistible power of advancing intelligence, and the Inquisition, without acknowledging it, felt its influence. Not more than ten persons were burnt alive in the time of Ferdinand the Sixth, and these were obscure relapsed Jews;—men whose fate is as heavy a reproach to the Inquisition as if they had been more intelligent and distinguished, but the example of whose punishment did not strike a terror such as that of the dying Protestants and patriots of Aragon had once done.[p. 250] The persecutions of the Holy Office, in fact, not only grew less frequent and cruel, but became more than ever subservient to the political authority of the country, and were now chiefly exercised in relation to Freemasonry, which was known at this period in Spain for the first time, and caused much uneasiness to the government. But the policy of the state, during the reign of Ferdinand the Sixth, was in the main peaceful and healing. Efforts, not without success, were made to collect materials for a history of the country from the earliest times. Spaniards were sent abroad to be educated at the public expense, and foreigners were encouraged to establish themselves in Spain, and to diffuse the knowledge they had acquired in their own more favored homes. Every thing, in short, indicated a spirit of change, if it did not give proof of much absolute progress.[314]

The direction of the literature of the country, however, was the same it had taken from the beginning of the century. Slight, but unsatisfactory, attempts continued to be made to adhere to the forms of the elder time;—such attempts as are to be seen in a long narrative poem by the Count Saldueña on the subject of Pelayo, and two very poor imitations of the “Para Todos” of Montalvan, one of which was by Moraleja, and the other by Ortiz. But the amount of what was undertaken in this way was very small, and the impulse was constantly diminishing; for the French school enjoyed now all the favor that was given to any form of elegant literature.[315]

[p. 251]

In this respect, a fashionable society, called The Academy of Good Taste, and connected with the court of Madrid, exercised some influence. It dates from 1749, and was intended, perhaps, to resemble those French coteries, which began in the reign of Louis the Thirteenth, at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and were long so important both in the literary and political history of France. The Countess of Lemos, at whose house it met, was its founder, and it gradually ranked among its members several of the more cultivated nobility and most of the leading men of letters, such as Luzan, Montiano, Blas Nasarre, and Velazquez, each of whom was known, either at that time or soon afterwards, by his published works.[316]

Except Luzan, of whom we have already spoken, Velazquez was the most distinguished of their number. He was descended from an old and noble family, in the South of Spain, and was born in 1722; but, from his position in society, he passed most of his life at court. There he became involved in the political troubles of the reign of Charles the Third, in consequence of which he suffered a long imprisonment from 1766 to 1772, and died of apoplexy the same year he was released.

Velazquez was a man of talent and industry, rather than a man of genius. He was a member, not only of the principal Spanish academies, but of the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, and wrote several works of learning relating to the literature and antiquities of his country. The only one of them now[p. 252] much valued was published in 1754, under the title of “Sources of Castilian Poetry,” of which it is, in fact, a history, coming down to his own times, or near to them. It is a slight work, confused in its arrangement, and too short to develope its subject satisfactorily; but it is written in a good style, and occasionally shows acuteness in its criticism of individual authors. Its chief fault is, that it is devoted to the French school, and is an attempt to carry out, by means of an historical discussion, the doctrines laid down nearly twenty years before by Luzan, in his theory of poetical composition.[317]

Mayans, a Valencian gentleman of learning, and another of those who had a considerable influence on Spanish literature at this period, followed a similar course in his “Retórica,” which appeared in 1757, and is founded rather on the philosophical opinions of the Roman rhetoricians than on the modification of those opinions by Boileau and his followers. It is a long and very cumbrous work, less fitted to the wants of the times than that of Luzan, and even more opposed to the old Castilian spirit, which submitted so unwillingly to rules of any sort. But it is a storehouse of curious extracts from authors belonging to the best period of Spanish literature, almost always selected with good judgment, if not always skilfully applied to the matter under discussion.[318]

To these works of Mayans, Velazquez, and Luzan[p. 253] should be added the Preface by Nasarre to the plays of Cervantes, in 1749, where an attempt is made to take the authority of his great name from the school that prevailed in his time, by showing that these unsuccessful efforts of the author of “Don Quixote” were only caricatures ridiculing Lope de Vega; not dramatic compositions intended for serious success in the extravagant career which Lope’s versatile genius had opened to his contemporaries. But this attempt was a failure, and was only one of a long series of efforts made to discountenance the old theatre, that must be noticed hereafter.[319]

The reign of Ferdinand the Sixth, which had been marked with little political energy during its continuance, was saddened, at its close, by the death of the monarch from grief at the loss of his queen. But it had not been without beneficial influences on the country. A wise economy had been introduced, for the first time since the discovery of America, into the administration of the state; the abused powers of the Church had been diminished by a concordat with the Pope; the progress of knowledge had been furthered; and Father Feyjoó, vigorous, though old, was still permitted, if not encouraged, to go on with his great task, and create a school that should rest on the broad principles of philosophy recognized in England and in France.

We must not, however, be misled by such general statements. Spain, notwithstanding half a century of advancement, was still deplorably behind the other countries of Western Europe in that intellectual cultivation, without which no nation in modern times can be prosperous, strong, or honored. “There is not,” says the Marquis of Enseñada, in a report made to the king, as minister of state,—“there is not a professorship[p. 255] of public law, of experimental science, of anatomy, or of botany, in the kingdom. We have no exact geographical maps of the country or its provinces, nor any body who can make them; so that we depend on the very imperfect maps we receive from France and Holland, and are shamefully ignorant of the true relations and distances of our own towns.”[320]

Under these circumstances, the accession of a prince like Charles the Third was eminently fortunate for the country. He was a man of energy and discernment, a Spaniard by birth and character, but one whom political connections had placed early on the throne of Naples, where, during a reign of twenty-four years, he had done much to restore the dignity of a decayed monarchy, and had learned much of the condition of Europe outside of the Pyrenees. When, therefore, the death of his half-brother called him to the throne of Spain, he came with a kind and degree of experience in affairs which fitted him well for his duties in the more important and more unfortunate kingdom, whose destinies he was to control for above a quarter of a century. Happily, he seems to have comprehended his position from the first, and to have understood that he was called to a great[p. 256] work of reform and regeneration, where his chief contest was to be with ecclesiastical abuses.

In some respects he was successful. His ministers, Roda, Florida-Blanca, Aranda, and Campomanes, were men of ability. By their suggestions and assistance, he abridged the Papal power so far, that no rescript or edict from Rome could have force in Spain without the expressed assent of the throne; he restrained the Inquisition from exercising any authority whatever, except in cases of obstinate heresy or apostasy; he forbade the condemnation of any book, till its author, or those interested in it, had had an opportunity to be heard in its defence; and, finally, deeming the Jesuits the most active opponents of the reforms he endeavoured to introduce, he, in one day, expelled their whole body from his dominions all over the world, breaking up their schools and confiscating their great revenues.[321] At the same time, he caused improved plans of study to be suggested; he made arrangements for popular education, such as were before unknown in Spain; and he raised the tone of instruction and the modes of teaching in the few higher institutions over which he could lawfully extend his control.

But many abuses were beyond his reach. When he appealed to the Universities, urging them to change their ancient habits, and teach the truths of the physical and exact sciences, Salamanca answered, in 1771, “Newton teaches nothing that would make a good logician or metaphysician, and Gassendi and Descartes do not agree so well with revealed truth as Aristotle does.” And the other Universities showed little more of the spirit of advancement.

[p. 257]With the Inquisition his success was far from being complete. His authority was resisted, as far as resistance was possible; but the progress of intelligence made all bigotry every year less active and formidable; and, whether it be an honor to his reign, or whether it be a disgrace, it is to be recorded, that the last person who perished at the stake in Spain, by ecclesiastical authority, was an unfortunate woman, who was burnt at Seville for witchcraft in 1781.[322]

Under the influence of a spirit like that of Charles the Third, during a reign protracted to twenty-nine years, there was a new and considerable advancement in whatever tends to make life desirable, of which the country on all sides gave token. The population, which had fled or died away, seemed to spring up afresh in places that oppression had made desert, and having regained something under the first of the Bourbons, it now, under the third, recovered rapidly the numbers it had lost in the days of the House of Austria, by wars all over the world, by emigration, by the persecution of the Jews and the expulsion of the Moriscos, by bad legislation, and by the cruel spirit of religious intolerance. The revenues in the same period were increased threefold, without adding to the burdens of the people; and the country seemed to be brought from a state of absolute bankruptcy to one of comparative ease and prosperity. It was certain, therefore, that Spain was not falling to ruin, as it had been in the time of Charles the Second.[323]

[p. 258]

But all intellectual cultivation is slow of growth, and all intellectual reform still slower. The life and health infused into the country were, no doubt, felt in every part of its physical system, reviving and renewing the powers that had been so long wasted away, and that at one period had seemed near to speedy dissolution. But it was obvious, that much time must still elapse before such healthful circulations could reach the national culture generally, and a still longer time before they could revive that elegant literature, which is the bright, consummate flower of all true civilization. Yet life was beginning to be seen. It was a dawn, if it was nothing more.

The first striking effect produced by this movement in the reigns of Ferdinand the Sixth and Charles the Third was one quite in sympathy with the spirit of the nation, then resisting the ecclesiastical abuses that had so long oppressed it. It was an attack on the style of popular preaching, which, originally corrupted by Paravicino, the distinguished follower of Góngora, had been constantly falling lower and lower, until, at last, it seemed to have reached the lowest point of degradation and vulgarity. The assailant was Father Isla, who was born in 1703 and died in 1781, at Bologna, where, being a Jesuit, he had retired, on the general expulsion of his Order from Spain.[324] His earliest published work is his “Triumph of Youth,” printed in 1727, to give the nation an account of a festival, celebrated that year during eleven days at Salamanca, in honor of two very youthful saints who had been Jesuits, and who had just been canonized by Benedict the Thirteenth; a gay tract, full of poems, farces, and accounts of the maskings and[p. 259] bull-fights to which the occasion had given rise, and coming as near as possible to open satire of the whole matter, but yet with great adroitness avoiding it.

In a work somewhat similar, he afterwards went further. It was a description of the proclamation made in 1746, at Pamplona, on the accession of Ferdinand the Sixth, which was attended with such extravagant and idle ceremonies, that, being required to give some account of them to the public, he could not refrain from indulging in his love of ridicule. But he did it with a satire so delicate and so crafty, that those who were its subjects failed at first to apprehend his real purpose. On the contrary, the Council of the proud capital of Navarre thanked him for the honor he had done them; the Bishop and Archbishop complimented him for it; several persons whom he had particularly noticed sent him presents; and, when the irony began to be suspected, it became a subject of public controversy, as in the case of De Foe’s “Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” whether the praise bestowed were in jest or in earnest;—Isla all the time defending himself with admirable ingenuity and wit, as if he were personally aggrieved at the unfavorable construction put upon his compliments. The discussion ended with his retreat or exile from Pamplona.[325]

He was, however, at this period of his life occupied with more serious duties, and soon found among them a higher mark for his wit. From the age of twenty-four he had been a successful preacher, and continued such until he was cruelly expelled from his own country. But he perceived how little worthy of its great subjects was the prevalent style of Spanish pulpit ora[p. 260]tory,—how much it was degraded by bad taste, by tricks of composition, by conceits and puns, and even by a low buffoonery, in which the vulgar monks, sent to preach in the churches or in the public streets and squares, indulged themselves merely to win applause from equally vulgar audiences, and increase the contributions they solicited by arts so discreditable. It is said that at first Father Isla was swept away by the current of his times, which ran with extraordinary force, and that he wrote, in some degree, as others did. But he soon recognized his mistake, and his numerous published sermons, written between 1729 and 1754, are marked with a purity and directness of style which had long been unknown, and which, though wanting the richness and fervor of the exhortations of Luis de Leon and Luis de Granada, would not have dishonored the Spanish pulpit even in their days.[326]

Isla, however, was not satisfied with merely setting a good example. He determined to make a direct attack on the abuse itself. For this purpose, he wrote what he called “The History of the Famous Preacher, Friar Gerund”; a satirical romance, in which he describes the life of one of these popular orators, from his birth in an obscure village, through his education in a fashionable convent, and his adventures as a missionary about the country; the fiction ending abruptly with his preparation to deliver a course of sermons in a city that seems intended to represent Madrid. It is written throughout with great spirit; and not only are the national manners and character everywhere present, but, in the episodes and in the occasional sketches Isla[p. 261] has given of conventual and religious life in his time, there is an air of reality which leaves no doubt that the author drew freely on the resources of his personal experience. Its plan resembles slightly that of “Don Quixote,” but its execution reminds us oftener of Rabelais and his discursive and redundant reflections, though of Rabelais without his coarseness. It is serious, as becomes the Spanish character, and conceals under its gravity a spirit of sarcasm, which, in other countries, seems inconsistent with the idea of dignity, but which, in Spain, has been more than once happily united with it, and made more effective by the union.

The sketches of character and specimens of fashionable pulpit oratory given in the “Friar Gerund” are the best parts of it, and are agreeable illustrations for the literary history of the eighteenth century. Of the preacher whom the Friar took for his model we have the following carefully drawn portrait:—

“He was in the full perfection of his strength, just about three-and-thirty years old; tall, robust, and stout; his limbs well set and well proportioned; manly in gait, inclining to corpulence, with an erect carriage of his head, and the circle of hair round his tonsure studiously and exactly combed and shaven. His clerical dress was always neat, and fell round his person in ample and regular folds. His shoes fitted him with the greatest nicety, and, above all, his silken cap was adorned with much curious embroidery and a fanciful tassel,—the work of certain female devotees who were dying with admiration of their favorite preacher. In short, he had a very youthful, gallant look; and, adding to this a clear, rich voice, a slight fashionable lisp, a peculiar grace in telling a story, a talent at mimicry, an easy action, a taking manner, a high-sounding style, and[p. 262] not a little effrontery,—never forgetting to sprinkle jests, proverbs, and homely phrases along his discourses with a most agreeable aptness,—he won golden opinions in his public discourses, and carried every thing before him in the drawing-rooms he frequented.”[327]

The style of eloquence of this vulgar ecclesiastical fop, a specimen of which follows, is no less faithfully and characteristically given; and was taken, as Father Isla intimates was his custom, from a discourse that had really been preached.[328]

“It was well known, that he always began his sermons with some proverb, some jest, some pot-house witticism, or some strange fragment, which, taken from its proper connections and relations, would seem, at first blush, to be an inconsequence, a blasphemy, or an impiety; until, at last, having kept his audience waiting a moment in wonder, he finished the clause, or came out with an explanation which reduced the whole to a sort of miserable trifling. Thus, preaching one day on the mystery of the Trinity, he began his sermon by saying, ‘I deny that God exists a Unity in essence and a Trinity in person,’ and then stopped short for an instant. The hearers, of course, looked round on one another, scandalized, or, at least, wondering what would be the end of this heretical blasphemy. At length, when the preacher thought he had fairly caught them, he went on,—‘Thus says the Ebionite, the Marcionite, the Arian, the Manichean, the Socinian; but I prove it against them all from the Scriptures, the Councils, and the Fathers.’

[p. 263]“In another sermon, which was on the Incarnation, he began by crying out, ‘Your health, cavaliers!’ and, as the audience burst into a broad laugh at the free manner in which he had said it, he went on:—‘This is no joking matter, however; for it was for your health and for mine, and for that of all men, that Christ descended from heaven and became incarnate in the Virgin Mary. It is an article of faith, and I prove it thus: “Propter nos, homines, et nostram salutem descendit de cœlo et incarnatus est,”’—whereat they all remained in delighted astonishment, and such a murmur of applause ran round the church, that it wanted little of breaking out into open acclamation.”[329]

The first volume of the “Friar Gerund” was printed in 1758, without the knowledge of the author, and in twenty-four hours eight hundred copies of it were sold.[330] Such an extraordinary popularity, however, proved any thing but a benefit. The priests, and especially the preaching friars, assailed it from all quarters, as the most formidable attack yet made in Spain on their peculiar craft. The consequence was, that, though the king and the court expressed their delight in its satire, the license to publish it further was withdrawn, its author was summoned before the Inquisition, and his book was condemned in 1760. But Isla was too strong in public favor and in the respect of the Jesuits to be personally punished, and the Friar Gerund was too true and too widely scattered to be more than nominally suppressed.[331]

[p. 264]The second volume did not fare so well. After the censure passed on the first, it could not, of course, be licensed, and so remained for a long time in manuscript, a forbidden book. In fact, it first appeared in England, and in the English language, in 1772, through the agency of Baretti, to whom the original had been sent after its author had gone to Italy. But an edition of the whole work in Spanish soon appeared at Bayonne, followed by other editions in other places; and, though it was never licensed at home till 1813,—and then only to be forbidden anew the next year, on the return of Ferdinand the Seventh,—still few books have been better known, all over Spain, to the more intelligent classes of the Spanish people, than Friar Gerund, from the day of its first publication to the present time. What is of more consequence, it was, from the first, successful in its main purpose. The sobriquet of Friar Gerund was given at once to those who indulged in the vulgar style of preaching it was intended to discountenance, and any one who was admitted to deserve the appellation could no longer collect an audience, except such as was gathered from the populace of the public squares.[332]

In consequence of the alarm and anxieties that accompanied his sudden and violent expulsion from Spain, in 1767, Father Isla suffered on the road an attack of paralysis, which made his health uncertain for the remaining fourteen years of his life. Still, after his death, it was found that in these sad years he had not been idle. Among his papers was a poem in sixteen cantos, containing above twelve thousand lines in octave stanzas. It is called “Cicero,” and claims to be a life of the great[p. 265] Roman orator. But it is no such thing. It is a satire on the vices and follies of the author’s own time, begun in Spain, but chiefly written during his exile in Italy; and, though it contains occasional sketches of an imaginary life of Cicero’s mother, they are very inconsiderable, and, as for Cicero himself, the poem leaves him in his cradle, only eighteen months old.

One of the subjects of its satire is the whole class of Spanish narrative poems, of which, and especially of those devoted to the lives of the saints, it may be regarded as a sort of parody; but its main purpose is to ridicule the lives of modern fine ladies, and the modes of early education then prevalent. The whole, however, is mingled with inappropriate discussions about Italy, poetry, and a country life, and hardly less inappropriate satire of professed musicians, theatres, and poets who praise one another; in short, with whatever occurred to Father Isla’s wayward humor as he was writing. From internal evidence, it seems to have been read, from time to time as it was written, to a society of friends,—probably some of the numerous exiles who, like himself, had resorted to Bologna, and subsisted there on the miserable pittance the Spanish government promised them, but often failed to pay. For such a purpose it was not ill adapted by its clear, flowing style, and occasionally by its pungent satire; but its cumbrous length and endless digressions, often trifling both in matter and manner, render it quite unfit for publication. It was, however, offered to the public censor, and permission to print it was refused, though for reasons so frivolous, that it seems certain the real objection was not to the poem, but to the author.[333]

[p. 266]

Others of Father Isla’s works were more fortunate. Six volumes of his sermons were collected and published, and six volumes of his letters, chiefly addressed to his sister and her husband, and written in a very affectionate and gay spirit. To these, at different times, were added a few minor works of a trifling character, and one or two that are religious.[334]

But what most surprised the world was his translation of “Gil Blas,” printed in 1787, claiming the work, on which the fame of Le Sage must always principally rest, as “stolen from the Spanish, and now,” in the words of Father Isla’s title-page, “restored to its country and native language by a Spaniard, who does not choose to have his nation trifled with.”[335] The external grounds for this extraordinary charge are slight. The first suggestion occurs in 1752, and is made by Voltaire, who, in his “Age of Louis the Fourteenth,” declares[p. 267] the Gil Blas “to be entirely taken from Espinel’s ‘Marcos de Obregon.’” This charge, as we have seen, is not true, and we have reason to believe that it was the result of personal ill-will on the part of Voltaire, who had himself been attacked in the Gil Blas, and who had, in some way or other, heard that Le Sage was indebted to Espinel. Afterwards, similar declarations are made in two or three books of no authority, and especially in a Biographical Dictionary printed at Amsterdam in 1771. But this is all.

Roused by such suggestions, however, Father Isla amused himself with making a translation of Gil Blas, adding to it a long and not successful continuation,[336] and declaring, without ceremony or proof, that it was the work of an Andalusian advocate, who gave his manuscript to Le Sage, when Le Sage was in Spain, either as a secretary of the French embassy, or as a friend of the French ambassador. But all this seems to be without any foundation, for the manuscript has never been produced; the advocate has never been named; and Le Sage was never in Spain. Still, the Spanish claim has not been abandoned. On the contrary, Llorente, in two ingenious and learned works on the subject, one in French and the other in Spanish, but both printed in 1822, reasserts it, with great earnestness, resting his proofs on internal evidence, and insisting that Gil[p. 268] Blas is certainly of Spanish origin, and that it is probably the work, not indeed of Father Isla’s Andalusian advocate, but of Solís, the historian;—a suggestion, for which Llorente produces no better reason, than that nobody else of the period to which he assigns the Gil Blas was able, in his judgment, to write such a romance.[337]

But there is a ready answer to all such merely conjectural criticism. Le Sage proceeded, as an author in romantic fiction, just as he had done when he wrote for the public theatre; and the results at which he arrived in both cases are remarkably similar. In the drama, he began with translations and imitations from the Spanish, such as his “Point of Honor,” which is taken from Roxas, and his “Don Cesar Ursino,” which is from Calderon; but afterwards, when he better understood his own talent and had acquired confidence from success, he came out with his “Turcaret,” a wholly original comedy, which, far surpassed all he had be[p. 269]fore attempted, and showed how much he had been wasting his strength as an imitator. Just so he did in romance-writing. He began with translating the “Don Quixote” of Avellaneda, and remodelling and enlarging the “Diablo Cojuelo” of Guevara. But the “Gil Blas,” the greatest of all his works of prose fiction, is the result of his confirmed strength; and, in its characteristic merits, is as much his own as the “Turcaret.”

On this point, the internal evidence is as decisive as the external. The frequent errors of this remarkable romance in Spanish geography and history show, that it could hardly have been the work of a Spaniard, and certainly not of a Spaniard so well informed as Solís; its private anecdotes of society in the time of Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth prove it to have been almost necessarily written by a Frenchman; while, at the same time, the freedom with which, as we go on, we find that every thing Spanish is plundered,—now a tale taken from “Marcos de Obregon,” now an intrigue or a story from a play of Mendoza, of Roxas, or of Figueroa,—points directly to Le Sage’s old habits, and to his practised skill in turning to account every thing that he deemed fitted to his purpose. The result is, that he has, by the force of his genius, produced a work of great brilliancy; in which, from his entire familiarity with Spanish literature and his unscrupulous use of it, he has preserved the national character with such fidelity, that a Spaniard is almost always unwilling to believe that the Gil Blas, especially now that he has it in the excellent version of Father Isla, could have been written by any body but one of his own countrymen.[338]

[p. 270]

The chief talent of Father Isla was in satire, and the great service he performed for his country was that of driving from its respectable churches the low and vulgar style of preaching with which they had long been infested;—a work which the “Friar Gerund” achieved almost as completely as the “Don Quixote” did that of destroying the insane passion for books of chivalry which prevailed in the seventeenth century.

But, meanwhile, other attempts were making in other directions to revive the literature of the country; some by restoring a taste for the old national poetry, some by attempting to accommodate every thing to the French doctrines of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, and some by an ill-defined and often, perhaps, unconscious struggle to unite the two opinions, and to form a school whose character should be unlike that of either and yet in advance of both.

In the direction of the earlier national poetry little was done by original efforts, but something was attempted in other ways. Huerta, a fierce, but inconsis[p. 271]tent, adversary of the French innovations, printed, in 1778, a volume of poems almost entirely in the old manner; but it was too much marked with the bad taste of the preceding century to enjoy even a temporary success, and its author, therefore, could boast of no follower of any note in a path which was constantly less and less trodden.[339]

On the other hand, more was done with effect to recall the memory of the old masters themselves. Lopez de Sedano, between 1768 and 1778, published his “Spanish Parnassus,” in nine volumes; a work which, though ill digested and not always showing good taste in its selections and criticisms, is still a rich mine of the poetry of the country in its best days, and contains important materials for the history of Spanish literature from the period of Boscan and Garcilasso.[340] Sanchez went further back, and in 1779 offered, to his countrymen, for the first time, the greater legendary treasures of their heroic ages, beginning with the noble old poem of the Cid, but unhappily leaving incomplete a task for which he had proved himself so well fitted by his learning and zeal, if not by his acuteness.[341] And finally, Sarmiento, a friend of Feyjoó, and one of his ablest public defenders, undertook an elaborate history of Spanish[p. 272] poetry, which contains important discussions relating to the period embraced by the inquiries of Sanchez, but which was broken off by the death of its venerable author in 1770, and remained unpublished till five years later.[342] These three works, though they excited too little attention at first, were still works of importance, and have served as the foundation for a better state of things since.

The doctrines of the French school, somewhat modified, perhaps, by the reproduction of the elder Spanish literature, but still substantially unchanged, found followers more numerous and active. During the reign of Charles the Third, Moratin the elder, a gentleman of an old Biscayan family, who was born in 1737, and died in 1780, succeeded, in a great degree, to the inheritance of Luzan’s opinions, and devoted himself to the reform of the taste of his countrymen. He was the friend of Montiano, who had himself endeavoured to introduce classical tragedy upon the Spanish stage, and who had, probably, some share in forming the literary character of the young poet. But the court, as usual, was an element in the movement. Moratin was received with flattering regard by the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, the head of the great house of the Guzmans; by the Duke of Ossuna, long ambassador in France; by Aranda, the wise minister of state, who rarely forgot the cause of intellectual culture; and by the Infante Don Gabriel de Bourbon, the accomplished translator of Sallust; and[p. 273] each of these persons was thus able, through Moratin, to exercise an influence on the state of letters in Spain.

His first public effort of any consequence, except a drama that will be noticed hereafter, was his “Poeta,” which appeared in 1764. It consists entirely of his own shorter poems, and is among the many proofs how small was the interest then felt in literature, since, though the whole collection fills only a hundred and sixty pages, it was found expedient to publish it in ten successive numbers, in order to give it a fair opportunity to be circulated and read. This was followed, the next year, by the “Diana,” a short didactic poem, in six books, on the Chase, and in 1765 by a narrative poem on the Destruction of his Ships by Cortés, to which if we add a volume published by the piety of his son in 1821, and containing, with a modest and beautiful life of their author, a collection of poems, most of which had not before been published, we shall have all of the elder Moratin that can now interest us.

Its value is not great; and yet portions of it are not likely to be soon forgotten. The “Epic Canto,” as he calls it, on the bold adventure of Cortés in burning his ships, is the noblest poem of its class produced in Spain during the eighteenth century, and gives more pleasure than almost any of the historical epics that preceded it in such large numbers. Some of his shorter pieces, like his ballads on Moorish subjects, and an ode to a champion in the bull-fights,—which Moratin constantly frequented, and of which he printed a pleasant historical sketch,—are full of spirit. All he wrote, indeed, is marked by purity and exactness of language and harmony of versification; showing that, though he possessed to an extraordinary degree the power of an improvisator, he composed carefully and finished with[p. 274] patience. But his chief success was as a public teacher; laboring faithfully in the chair of the Imperial College, where he took the place of his friend Ayala, and rebuking the bad taste of his times by the strength of his own modest example.[343]

Moratin was an amiable man, and gathered the men of letters of the Spanish capital in a friendly circle about him. They met in one of the better class of taverns,—the Fonda de San Sebastian,—where they maintained a club-room that was always open and ready to receive them. Ayala, the tragic writer; Cerdá, the literary antiquarian; Rios, who wrote the analysis of “Don Quixote” prefixed to the magnificent edition of the Academy; Ortega, the botanist and scholar; Pizzi, the Professor of Arabic Literature; Cadahalso, the poet and essayist; Muñoz, the historian of the New World; Yriarte, the fabulist; Conti, the Italian translator of a collection of Spanish poetry; Signorelli, the author of the general history of theatres; and others,—were members of this pleasant association, and resorted continually to its cheerful saloon.

How truly Spanish was the tone of their intercourse may be gathered from the fact, that they had but one law to govern all their proceedings, and that was, never to speak on any subject except the Theatre, Bull-fights, Love, and Poetry. But in every thing they undertook[p. 275] they were much in earnest. They read their works to each other for mutual, friendly criticism, and discussed freely whatever was written at the time, and whatever they thought would tend to revive the decayed spirit of their country. They read, too, and examined the literature of other nations; and, if their tendencies were more towards the school of Boileau and the great masters of Italy, than might have been anticipated from the spirit of their association, it should be borne in mind, that two of their most active members were Italian men of letters, that the court had recently come from Naples, and that the spirit of the times much favored all that was French, and especially the French theatre.[344]

Among the most interesting members of this agreeable society was José de Cadahalso, a gentleman descended from one of the old mountain families of the North of Spain, but born at Cadiz in 1741. His education was conducted from early youth in Paris, but before he was twenty years old he had visited Italy, Germany, England, and Portugal, and obtained a knowledge of the language and literature of each, and especially of England, sufficient to emancipate him from many national prejudices, and make him more useful to the cause of letters at home than he would otherwise have been.

On his return to Spain he took the military dress of Santiago, and entered the army. There he rose rapidly, till he reached the rank of colonel; but, in all the different places to which his own choice or the service of his regiment carried him,—Saragossa, Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, and Salamanca,—he sought occasion to[p. 276] continue his earlier pursuits, and succeeded in connecting himself with the leading spirits of the time, such as Moratin, Iglesias, Yriarte, the wise Jovellanos, and the young and promising Melendez Valdes. But his career, though successful, was short. He perished at the siege of Gibraltar, struck by a bomb, on the 27th of February, 1782, and the governor of the besieged fortress joined in the general sorrow over the grave of an honorable enemy who had been distinguished alike in letters and in arms.[345]

In 1772 Cadahalso published his “Eruditos á la Violeta,” or Fashionable Learning, to which, from its considerable success, he added a supplement the same year. The original work is a pleasant satire on the superficial scholarship of his times, and is thrown into the form of directions how to teach the whole circle of human knowledge in a course of lectures, that shall just fill the seven days of the week; the supplement giving a few further illustrations of the same subject, and some of the results of such teachings on the unhappy scholars who had been its victims. This, with a volume of poems printed the next year, and containing several careful translations from the ancients, a few satirical trifles after the manner of Quevedo, and a good many Anacreontic songs and tales in the manner of Villegas, are all of his works that were published during his lifetime.

But after his death there was found among his papers a collection of letters, supposed to have been[p. 277] written by a person connected with an embassy to Spain from Morocco, and addressed to his friends at home. They belong to the large family of works of fiction, begun by Marana’s “Turkish Spy,” and are commonly set down as imitations of Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters,” but, in fact, show a nearer relationship with Goldsmith’s “Citizen of the World.” The whole work, however, is more occupied with literary discussions and temporary satire, than either of those just referred to; and therefore, though it is written in a pure and pleasant style, with wit and good sense, it has been far from obtaining a place, like theirs, in the general regard of the world. Still, like the rest of his posthumous works, which comprise a few more compositions in prose satire and a few more poems, the best of which are in the old short verses always so popular in Spain, “The Moorish Letters” of Cadahalso have been often reprinted, and probably are not destined to be forgotten.[346]

Another member of the society founded by Moratin, and one of the most prominent of them, was Thomas de Yriarte, a gentleman who was born on the island of Teneriffe in 1750, but received that part of his education which decided the course of his life at Madrid, under the auspices of his uncle, Don Juan de Yriarte, the learned head of the King’s Library. The young man was known as a dramatic writer, and as a translator of French plays for the royal theatres, from the age of eighteen; and from the age of twenty-one, when he printed some good Latin verses on the birth of the[p. 278] Infante, afterwards Charles the Fourth, he was distinguished at court for his accomplishments both in ancient and modern literature. Soon after this period he received a place under the government; and, though his employments, both in the Office of Foreign Affairs and in that of the Department of War, were of an intellectual nature, still his time was much occupied by them, and his opportunities for the indulgence of a poetical taste were much diminished. Besides this, he had rivalries and troubles with Sedano, Melendez, Forner, and some others of his contemporaries, and was summoned before the Inquisition in 1786, as one tainted with the new French philosophy. The result of all these trials and interruptions was, that when, after his death, which occurred in 1791, his works were collected and published, more than half of the eight small volumes through which they were spread was found to consist of translations and personal controversies; the translations made with skill, and the quarrels managed with spirit and wit, but neither of them important enough to be now remembered.

His original poetry is better. It is marked by purity of style, regularity, and elegance, but not by power or elevation. The best of what is merely miscellaneous is to be found in eleven Epistles, with one of which, addressed to his friend Cadahalso, he dedicates to him a translation of Horace’s “Art of Poetry.” But in two departments, where his natural taste led him to labor with a decided preference, he apparently made more effort than in any other, and had greater success.

The first of these was didactic poetry. His poem “On Music,”—a subject which he chose from his considerable proficiency in that art,—appeared in 1780, and was soon favorably known, not only at home, but[p. 279] in Italy and France. It consists of five books, in which he discusses with philosophical precision the elements of music; musical expression of different kinds, but especially martial and sacred; the music of the theatre; that of society; and that of man in solitude. The poem is written in the free, national silva, irregular, but flowing, and no want of skill is shown in its management. But, as a whole, it has too little richness and vigor to give life to the cold forms of instruction, in which it is throughout rigorously cast.[347]

The other department, in which Yriarte was more successful, was that of fables. Here he, in some degree, struck out a new path; for he not only invented all his fictions, which no other fabulist in modern times had done, but restricted them all, in their moral purpose, to the correction of the faults and follies of men of learning,—an application which had not before been thought of. Their whole number, including a few that are posthumous, is nearly eighty, above sixty of which appeared in 1782. They are written with great care, in no less than forty different measures, and show an extraordinary degree of ingenuity in adapting the attributes and instincts of animals to the instruction, not of mankind at large, as had always been done before, but to that of a separate and small class, between whom and the inferior creation the resemblance is rarely obvious. The task was certainly a difficult one. Perhaps, on this[p. 280] account, they are too narrative in their structure, and fail somewhat in the genial spirit which distinguishes Æsop and La Fontaine, the greatest masters of Apologue and Fable. But their influence was so much needed in the age of bad writing when they appeared, and they are besides so graceful in their versification, that they were not only received with great favor at first, but have never lost it since. Their author’s reputation, in fact, now rests on them almost exclusively.[348]

Yriarte, however, had a rival, who shared these honors with him, and in some respects obtained them even earlier. This was Samaniego, a Biscayan gentleman of rank and fortune, who was born in 1745, and died in 1801; having devoted his life, in the most disinterested manner, to the welfare of his native province. He was one of the earliest and most active members of the first of those societies sometimes called “Friends of the Country,” and sometimes “Societies for Public Improvement,” which began in the reign of Charles the Third, and soon spread through Spain, exercising an important influence on the education and public economy of the kingdom, and laboring to raise the arts of life from the degraded condition into which they had fallen during the latter period of the dominion of the House of Austria.

The Biscayan Society, founded in 1765, devoted itself much to the education of the people; and, to favor this great cause, Samaniego undertook to write fables suited to the capacity of the children taught in the Society’s seminary. How early he began to prepare them is not known; but in the first portion, published in 1781, and[p. 281] therefore one year before those of Yriarte appeared, he speaks of Yriarte as his model, and leaves no doubt that the fables of that poet had been seen by him. The second part of Samaniego’s collection was published in 1784, when that of his rival had been admired by the public long enough to change the relations of the two authors, and bring up a quarrel of pamphlets between them, little creditable to either. Both parts, taken together, contain a hundred and fifty-seven fables, the last nineteen of which and a few others are original, while the rest are taken, partly from Æsop, Phædrus, and the Oriental fabulists, but chiefly from La Fontaine and Gay. They succeeded at once. The children learned them by heart, and the teachers of the children found in them subjects for pleasant reading and reflection. They were, no doubt, less carefully written than the fables of Yriarte, less original and less exactly adapted to their purpose; but they were more free-hearted, more natural, and adapted to a larger class of readers; in short, there is a more easy poetical genius about them, and therefore, even if they cannot claim a higher merit than those of Yriarte, they have taken a stronger hold on the national regard.[349]

The best of them are the shortest and simplest, like the following, entitled “The Scrupulous Cats,” which was well suited to the time when it appeared, and can hardly be amiss at any other.

Samaniego was not the only person who, without belonging to the society of Moratin and his friends, coöperated with them in their efforts to encourage a better tone in the literature of their country. Among those who, from a similar impulse, but with less success, took the same direction, were Arroyal, who, in 1784, published a collection of poems, which he calls Odes, but which are oftener epigrams; and Montengon, a Jesuit, who, after the expulsion of his Order from Spain, began, in 1786, with his “Eusebio,” a work on education, partly in imitation of the “Télémaque,” and then went on rapidly with a prose epic called “Rodrigo,” a volume of Odes, and several other works, written with little talent, and showing by their inaccuracies of style that their author had been an exile in Italy till his mother tongue had become strange to him. To these should be added Gregorio de Salas, a quiet ecclesiastic, who wrote odes, fables, and other trifles, that were several times printed after 1790; Ignacio de Meras, a courtier of the worst days of Charles the Fourth, whose worthless dramas and miscellaneous poetry appeared in 1792; and the Count de Noroña, a soldier and diplomatist, who, besides a dull epic on the separation of the Arabian empire in Spain from that of the East, printed, in 1799-1800,[p. 283] two volumes of verse so light, that they procured for him sometimes the title of the Spanish Dorat. But all these writers only showed a constantly increasing disposition to fall more and more into the feebler French school of the eighteenth century; and while none of them had the talent of the few active spirits collected at the Fonda de San Sebastian in Madrid, none certainly exercised the sort of influence they did on the poetry of their time.[351]

Both the parties, into which Spanish literature was divided about the middle of the eighteenth century, erred by running into those extremes of opinion which are rarely right in any thing and never in matters of taste. Moratin was wrong in speaking with contempt of such poetry as the fine old ballad of “Calaynos,” and Huerta was equally wrong when he said, that the “Athalie” of Racine might be fit to be represented by boarding-school misses, but was fit for nothing else. It was natural, therefore, that another party, or school, should be formed, which should endeavour to avoid the excesses of both its predecessors, and unite their merits; one that should not be insensible to the power and richness of the old writers of the time of the Philips, and yet, escaping from their extravagances and bad taste, should mould itself in some degree according to the severe state of literary opinion then prevailing on the Continent. Such a school in fact appeared at Salamanca in the latter part of the reign of Charles the Third and the beginning of that of Charles the Fourth.

Its proper founder was Melendez Valdes, who was born in Estremadura, in 1754, and at the age of eighteen[p. 286] was sent to study at Salamanca, where, if he did not pass the larger remaining portion of his life, he passed at least its happiest and best years.[352] As a versifier, he began early, and in a bad school; writing at first in the manner of Lobo, who was still read and admired. But he soon fell indirectly under the influence of Moratin and his friends at Madrid, who were in every way opposed to the bad taste of their time. By a fortunate accident Cadahalso was carried fresh from the meetings of the club of the Fonda de San Sebastian to Salamanca. His discerning kindness detected at once the talent its possessor had not yet discovered. He took Melendez into his house; showed him the merit of the elder literature of his country, as well as that of the other cultivated nations of Europe; and devoted himself so earnestly and so affectionately to the development of his young friend’s genius, that it was afterwards said, with some truth, that, among all the works of Cadahalso, the best was Melendez. At the same period, too, Melendez became acquainted with Iglesias and Gonzalez; and through the latter was placed in relations of friendship with the commanding mind of Jovellanos, who exercised from the first moment of their intercourse an obvious and salutary influence over him.

His earliest public success was in 1780, when he obtained a prize offered by the Spanish Academy for the best eclogue. Yriarte, who was some years older, and had already become favorably known at court and in the capital, was his most formidable rival. But the poem Yriarte offered, which is on the pleasures of a country life, as set forth by one disgusted with that of[p. 287] the city, is somewhat in the formal, declamatory style of the less fortunate portions of the older Spanish pastorals; while that of Melendez is fresh from the fields, and as one of the judges said, in the discussion that followed its reading, seems absolutely to smell of their wild flowers. It was, indeed, in sweetness and gentleness, if not in originality and strength, such a return to the tones of Garcilasso, as had not been heard in Spain for above a century. Yriarte received the second honors of the contest, but was not satisfied with such a decision, and made known his feelings by an ill-judged attack upon the successful eclogue of his rival. The popular favor, however, fully sustained the Academy, and its vote on that occasion has never been reversed.

The next year Melendez came to Madrid. He was received with great kindness by Jovellanos and his friends; and obtained new honors at the Academy of San Fernando, by an ode “On the Glory of the Arts,” which that Academy had been founded to foster. But his preference was still for his old poetical haunts on the banks of the Tórmes, and, having obtained the chair of Professor of the Humanities or Philology, at Salamanca, he gladly returned thither, and devoted himself to its unostentatious duties.

In 1784, at the suggestion of Jovellanos, he became a competitor for the prize offered by the city of Madrid for a comedy, and wrote “The Marriage of Camacho.” But his talent was not dramatic; and therefore, though he obtained the votes of the judges, he did not, to the great disappointment of his patron, obtain those of the public when his drama was brought to the test of a free representation.

This failure, however, he retrieved a year afterwards, by publishing a small volume of poetry, chiefly lyric[p. 288] and pastoral. Most of it is in the short, national verse, and nearly all is marked with a great gentleness of spirit and a truly poetical sensibility. The Anacreontics which it contains remind us of Villegas, but have more philosophy and more tenderness than his. The ballads, for which his talent was no less happily fitted, if they lack the abrupt vigor of the elder times, have a grace, a lightness, and a finish which belong to that more advanced period of a nation’s poetry, when the popular lyre has ceased to give forth new and original tones. But everywhere this little volume shows traces of an active fancy and powers of nice observation, which break forth in rich and faithful descriptions of natural scenery, and in glimpses of what is tenderest and truest in the human heart. It was, in fact, a volume of poetry more worthy of the country than any that had been produced in Spain since the disappearance of the great lights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and it was received, in consequence, with general enthusiasm, not only for its own sake, but as the long-looked-for dawn of a brighter day.

But his success was not altogether wisely used by Melendez. He had been in the habit for some years of spending his vacations at court, where he was a favorite with many persons of distinction; and, now that he had risen so much in general consideration, he employed his influence in soliciting for himself a place under the government,—an old weakness in the Castilian character, which, however it might be disguised by the loyalty of public service, has broken down the independence and happiness of multitudes of high-minded men who have yielded to it. Melendez, unfortunately, succeeded in his aspirations. In 1789 he was made a judge in one of the courts of Saragossa, and in 1791 was raised to[p. 289] a dignified position in the Chancery of Valladolid; thus involving himself more or less with the political government of the country, to which, during the administration of the Prince of the Peace, every officer it employed was in some way made subservient.

He did not, however, neglect his favorite pursuits. He fulfilled with faithfulness and ability the duties of his place; but poetry was still his first love, for whose service he rescued many hours of secret and fond devotion. In 1797, he published a new edition of his works, more than doubling their original amount, and dedicating them to the reigning favorite,—the master of all fortunes in the country he governed so ill. It was successful. The new portions wore a somewhat graver and more philosophical air than his earliest lyrics and pastorals had done, and showed more the influence of studies in English and German literature. But this was not, on the whole, an improvement. He felt, undoubtedly, that the tremendous revolutions he witnessed on all sides, in the fall of kingdoms and the convulsions of society, prescribed to poetry subjects more lofty and solemn than he had been wont to seek; and he made an effort to rise to a requisition so severe. Once or twice he intimates a consciousness that he was not equal to the undertaking; and yet his “Ode to Winter,” as a season for reflection, which shows how much he had read Thomson, his “Ode to Truth,” and his “Ode on the Presence of God in his Works,” are not unworthy of their lofty subjects. Several of his philosophical epistles, too, are good; especially those to Jovellanos and the Prince of the Peace. But, in his longer canzones, where he sometimes imitates Petrarch, and in his epic canto on “The Fall of Lucifer,” which[p. 290] was evidently suggested by Milton, he failed.[353] On the whole, therefore, the attempt to introduce a new tone into Spanish poetry,—a tone of moral and, in some degree, of metaphysical discussion, to which he was urged by Jovellanos,—if it did not diminish the permanent fame of Melendez, did not add to it. The concise energy and philosophical precision such a tone requires are, in fact, foreign from the fervent genius of the old Castilian verse, and hardly consistent with that submissive religious faith which is one of the most important elements of the national character. In this direction, therefore, Melendez has been little followed.

As, however, we have intimated, this new publication of his works was successful. The Prince of the Peace was flattered by his share in it; and Melendez received, in consequence, an important employment about the court, which brought him to Madrid, where, his friend Jovellanos having been made a minister of state, his position became, for a moment, most agreeable and happy; while, for the future, a long vista of preferment and fame seemed opening before him. But the very next year, the virtuous and wise man on whom rested so many hopes, besides those of Melendez, fell from power; and, according to the old custom of the Spanish monarchy, his political friends were involved in his ruin. At first, Melendez was exiled to Medina del Campo, and afterwards to Zamora; but in 1802 the rigor of his persecution was mitigated, and he was permitted[p. 291] to return to Salamanca, the scene of his earliest and happiest fame.

But he returned there a saddened and disappointed man; little inclined to poetical studies, and with little of the tranquillity of spirit necessary to pursue them successfully. At the end of six weary years came the revolution of Aranjuez, and he was again free. He hastened at once to Madrid. But he was too late. The king was already at Bayonne, and the French power was in the ascendant in the capital. Unfortunately, he attached himself to the new government of Joseph, and shared first its disasters and then its fate. Once he was absolutely led out to be shot by the excited population of Oviedo, where he had been sent as a commissioner. On another occasion, his house at Salamanca was sacked, and his precious library destroyed, by the very French party whose interests he served. At last, when all was lost, he fled. But, before he crossed the frontier, he knelt down and kissed the last spot of earth that he could call Spain; and then, as the Bidassoa received his tears, cried out in anguish that “he should never again tread the soil of his country.” His prophecy was fulfilled as sadly as it was made. Four miserable years he lived as an exile in the South of France, and then died at Montpellier, on the 24th of May, 1817, in poverty and suffering.[354]

To solace the heavy hours of his exile, he occupied himself with preparing the materials for a final publication of all he had written, embracing many new po[p. 292]ems and many changes in those already published;—all which appeared in 1820, and have constituted the basis of the different editions of his works that have been given to the world since. Like the previous collections, it shows, not, indeed, a poetical genius of the first order, nor one with very flexible or very various attributes, but certainly a genius of great sweetness; always winning and graceful whenever the subject implies tenderness, and sometimes vigorous and imposing when it demands power. What Melendez wrote with success was a great advance upon the poetry of Montiano, and even upon that of the elder Moratin. It was more Castilian, and more full of feeling, than theirs. In style, too, it was more free, and it has done much to settle the poetical manner that has since prevailed. Gallicisms occasionally occur that might have been avoided, though many of them have now become a part of the recognized resources of Spanish poetry; but more often Melendez has revived old and neglected words and phrases, which have thus been restored to their place in the language, and have increased its wealth. As a general remark, his verse is not only flowing, but well suited to his subjects; and whether we consider what he has done himself, or what influence he has exercised over others,—especially when we read the little volume he published in the freshness of his youth, while he was still unknown at court and still careless of the convulsions that were at last to overwhelm him,—there can be no doubt that he was better fitted to form a new school and give a guiding impulse to the national poetry than any writer that had appeared in Spain for above a century.[355]

[p. 293]

Older than Melendez, but somewhat influenced by him and by Cadahalso, who had an effect on the taste of both, was the excellent Father Diego Gonzalez, a modest Augustinian monk, a part of whose life was spent in active religious duties at Salamanca, where he became intimate with the poets of the new school; a part of it at Seville, where he was the friend of Jovellanos; and a part of it at Madrid, where he died in 1794, about sixty years old, sincerely lamented by some of the noblest spirits of his time. As a poet, Gonzalez adhered more to the old Castilian school than Melendez did. But his model was the best. He imitated Luis de Leon; and did it with such happy success, that, in some of his odes and in some of his versions of the Psalms, we might almost think we were listening to the solemn tones of his great master. His most popular poems, however, were light and gay; such as his verses “To a Perfidious Bat,” which have been very often printed; his verses “To a Lady who had burned her Finger”; and similar trifles, in which he showed that all the secret idiomatic graces of the old Castilian were at his command. A didactic poem on “The Four Ages of Man,” which he began, and in the first book of which there is a fine dedication of the whole to Jovellanos, was never finished. Indeed, his poetry, though much known and circulated during his lifetime, was an object of little interest or care to himself, and was collected[p. 294] with difficulty after his death, and published by his faithful friend, Juan Fernandez.[356]

Other poets, among whom were Forner, Iglesias, and Cienfuegos, were more under the influence of the Salamanca school than Gonzalez was. Forner, like Melendez, was born in Estremadura, and the two young friends were educated together at Salamanca. In his critical opinions,—partly shown in a satire “On the Faults introduced into Castilian Poetry,” which gained an academic prize in 1782, and partly in his controversies with Huerta on the subject of the Spanish theatre,—he inclines much to the stricter French school. But his poetry is more free than such opinions would imply; and in his latter years, when he lived as a magistrate at Seville, and studied Herrera, Rioja, and the other old masters who were natives of its soil, he attached himself yet more decidedly to the national manner, and approached nearer to the serene severity of Gonzalez. Unhappily, his life, besides being much crowded with business, was short. He died in 1797, only forty-one years old; and, except his prose works, the best of which is a well-written defence of the literary reputation of his country against the injurious imputations of foreigners, he left little to give the world proof of the merits he possessed, or the influence he really exercised.[357]

Iglesias, though his life was even shorter, was, in some respects, more fortunate. He was born in Sala[p. 295]manca, and educated there under the most favorable auspices. Offended at the low state of morals in his native city, he indulged himself at first in the free forms of Castilian satire;—ballads, apologues, epigrams, and especially the half-simple, half-malicious letrillas, in which he was eminently successful. But, when he became a parish priest, he thought such lightness unbecoming the example he wished to set before his flock. He devoted himself, therefore, to serious composition; wrote serious ballads, eclogues, and silvas in the manner of Melendez; and published a didactic poem on theology;—all a result of a most worthy purpose, and all written in the pure style which is one of his prominent merits; but none of it giving token of the instinctive promptings of his genius, and none of it fitted to increase his final reputation. After his death, which occurred in 1791, when he was thirty-eight years old, this became at once apparent. His works were collected and published in two volumes; the first being filled with the graver class of his poems, and the second with the satirical. The decision of the public was instant. His lighter poems were too free, but they were better imitations of Quevedo than had yet been seen, and became favorites at once; the serious poems were dull, and soon ceased to be read.[358]

Cienfuegos, who was ten years younger than Melendez, was more strictly his follower than either of the two poets last mentioned. But he had fallen on evil times, and his career, which promised to be brilliant, was cut[p. 296] short by the troubles they brought upon him. In 1798 he published his poetical works; the miscellaneous portion consisting of Anacreontics, odes, ballads, epistles, and elegies, which, while they give proof of much real talent and passion, show sometimes an excess of sentimental feeling, and sometimes a desire to imitate the metaphysical and philosophical manner supposed to be demanded by the spirit of the age. Both were defects, to which he had been partly led by the example of his friend and master, Melendez, at whose feet he long sat in the cloisters of Salamanca; and both were affectations, from which a character so manly and decided as that of Cienfuegos might in time have emancipated itself.

But the favor with which this publication was received procured for him the place of editor of the government gazette, at Madrid; and, when the French occupied that capital, in 1808, he was found firm at his post, determined to do his duty to his country. Murat, who had the command of the invading forces, endeavoured, at first, to seduce or drive him into submission, but, failing in this, condemned him to death; a sentence which would infallibly have been carried into execution,—since Cienfuegos refused to make the smallest concession to the French authority,—if his friends had not interfered and procured a commutation of it into transportation to France. The change, however, was hardly a mercy. The sufferings of the journey, in which he travelled as a prisoner; the grief he felt at leaving his friends in hands which had hardly spared his own life; and the anticipation of a long exile in the midst of his own and his country’s enemies, were too much for his patriotic and generous spirit; and he died in July, 1809, at the age of forty-five, only a few days[p. 297] after he had reached the spot assigned for his punishment.[359]

One other person, already referred to with honor, must now be particularly noticed, who, if his life belonged to the state, still wrote poetry with success, and exercised over the school formed at Salamanca an influence which belongs to the history of letters. This person was Jovellanos, the wise magistrate and minister of Charles the Fourth, and the victim of his master’s unworthy weakness and of the still more unworthy vengeance of the reigning favorite. He was born in Gijon, in Asturias, in 1744, and from his earliest youth seems to have shown that love of intellectual cultivation, and that moral elevation of character, which distinguished the whole of the more mature portions of his life.

The position of his family was such, that all the means for a careful education to be found in Spain were open to him; and, as he was originally destined to the higher dignities of the Church, he was sent to study philosophy and the canon and civil law at Oviedo, Avila, Alcalá de Henares, and Madrid. But, just as he was about to take the irrevocable step that would have bound him to an ecclesiastical life, some of his friends, and especially the distinguished statesman, Juan Arias de Saavedra, who was like a second father to him, interfered, and changed his destination. The consequence of this intervention was, that, in 1767, he was sent as a judicial magistrate to Seville, where, by his humane spirit, and his disinterested and earnest devotion to the duties of a difficult and disagreeable place, he made him[p. 298]self generally loved and respected; while, at the same time, by his study of political economy and the foundations of all just legislation, he prepared the way for his own future eminence in the affairs of his country.

But the spirit of Jovellanos was of kindred with whatever was noble and elevated. At Seville, he early discovered the merit of Diego Gonzalez, and through him was led into a correspondence with Melendez. One result of this is still to be found in the poetical Epistle of Jovellanos to his friends in Salamanca, exhorting them to rise to the highest strains of poetry. Another was the establishment of a connection between himself and Melendez, which, while it was important to the young school at Salamanca, led Jovellanos to give more of his leisure to the elegant literature he had always loved, but from which the serious business of life had, for some time, much separated him.

In consequence of an accidental conversation, he wrote at Seville his prose comedy of “The Honored Criminal,” which had a remarkable success; and in 1769 he prepared a poetical tragedy on the subject of Pelayo, which was not printed till several years afterward. Shorter poetical compositions, sometimes grave and sometimes gay, served to divert his mind in the intervals of severe labor; and when, after a period of ten years, he left the brilliant capital of Andalusia, his poetical Epistle to his friends there shows how deeply he felt that he was leaving behind him the happiest period of his life.

This was in 1778, when he was called to Madrid, as one of the principal magistrates of the capital and court; a place that brought him again into the administration of criminal justice, from which, during his stay at Seville, he had been relieved. His duties were distaste[p. 299]ful to his nature, but he fulfilled them faithfully, and consoled himself by intercourse with such men as Campomanes and Cabarrus, who devoted themselves, as he did, to the great task of raising the condition of their country. Of course, he had now little leisure for poetry. But, being accidentally employed on affairs of consequence at the Paular convent, he was so struck by the solemn scenery in which it stood, and the tranquil lives of its recluse inhabitants, that his poetical spirit broke out afresh in an address to Mariano Colon, one of the family of the great discoverer of America, and afterwards its head;—a beautiful epistle, full of the severe genius of the place that inspired it, and of its author’s longing for a repose his spirit was so well fitted to enjoy.

In 1780, he was raised to a place in the Council of Orders, where he had more leisure, and was able to give his time to higher objects;—some of the results of which are to be seen in his report to the government on the military and religious Orders of Knighthood; in his system of instruction for the Imperial College of Calatrava; in his Discourse on the Study of History, as a necessary part of the wise study of jurisprudence; and in other similar labors, which proved him to be incontestably an excellent prose-writer, and the first philosophical statesman in the kingdom.

At the same time, however, he amused himself with elegant literature, and took great solace in collecting around him the poets and men of letters whom he loved. In 1785, he wrote several burlesque ballads on the quarrels of Huerta, Yriarte, and Forner about the theatre; and the next year published two satires in blank verse and in the style of Juvenal, rebuking the corrupted manners of his times. All of them were received[p. 300] with favor; and the ballads, though not printed till long afterwards, were perhaps only the more effective because they were circulated in manuscript, and so became matters of great interest.

Persons who held the tone implied in such a course of public labors might be sustained at the court of Charles the Third, but were little likely to enjoy regard at that of his son. In 1790, two years after Charles the Fourth ascended the throne, Count Cabarrus not only fell from power, but was thrown into prison; and Jovellanos, who did not hesitate to defend him, was sent to Asturias in a sort of honorable exile, that lasted eight years. But he served his fellow-men as gladly in disgrace as he did in power. Hardly, therefore, had he reached his native city, when he set about urging forward all public improvements that he deemed useful; laboring in whatever related to the mines and roads, and especially in whatever related to the general education of the people, with the most disinterested zeal. During this period of enforced retirement, he made many reports to the government on different subjects connected with the general welfare, and wrote his excellent tract “On Public Amusements,” afterwards published by the Academy of History, and his elaborate treatise on Legislation in Relation to Agriculture, which extended his reputation throughout Europe, and has been the basis of all that has been wisely undertaken in Spain on that difficult subject ever since.

In 1797, Count Cabarrus was restored to the favor of Godoy, Prince of the Peace, and Jovellanos was recalled to court and made Minister of Justice. But his season of favor was short. Godoy still hated the elevated views of the man to whom he had reluctantly delegated a small portion of his own power; and in[p. 301] 1798, under the pretext of devoting him to his old employments, he was again exiled to the mountains of Asturias, which, like so many other distinguished men that have sprung from them, he loved with a fond prejudice that he did not care to disguise.

This exile, however, did not satisfy the jealous favorite. In 1801, partly through a movement of the Inquisition, and still more through a political intrigue, Jovellanos was suddenly seized in his bed, and, in violation both of law and decency, carried, like a common felon, across the whole kingdom, and embarked at Barcelona for Majorca. There he was confined, first in a convent and afterwards in a fortress, with such rigor, that all communication with his friends and with the affairs of the world was nearly cut off; and there he remained, for seven long years, exposed to privations and trials that undermined his health and broke down his constitution. At last came the abdication and fall of his weak and ungrateful sovereign. “And then,” says Southey, in his “History of the Peninsular War,” “next to the punishment of Godoy, what all men most desired was the release of Jovellanos.” He was, therefore, at once brought back, and everywhere welcomed with the affection and respect, that he had earned by so many services and through such unjust sufferings.

His infirmities, however, were very oppressive to him. He declined, therefore, all public employments, even among his friends who adhered to the cause of their country; he indignantly rejected the proposal of the French invaders to become one of the principal ministers of state in the new order of things they hoped to establish; and then slowly and sadly retired, to seek among his native mountains the repose he needed. But he was not permitted long to remain there. As soon[p. 302] as the first central Junta was organized at Seville, he was sent to it to represent his native province, and stood forth in its councils the leading spirit in the darkest and most disheartening moments of the great contest of his country for existence. On the dissolution of that body,—which was dissolved at his earnest desire,—he again returned home, broken down with years, labors, and sufferings; trusting that he should now be permitted to end his days in peace.

But no man with influence such as his could then have peace in Spain. Like others, in those days of revolution, he was assailed by the fierce spirit of faction, and in 1811 replied triumphantly to his accusers in a defence of what may be considered his administration of Spain in the two preceding years, written with the purity, elegance, and gravity of manner which marked his best days, and with a moral fervor even more eloquent than he had shown before. As he approaches the conclusion of this personal vindication, admirable alike for its modesty and its power, he says, with a sorrow he does not strive to conceal:—

“And now that I am about to lay down my pen, I feel a secret trouble at my heart, which will disturb the rest of my life. It has been impossible for me to defend myself without offending others; and I fear, that, for the first time, I shall begin to feel I have enemies whom I have myself made such. But, wounded in that honor which is my life, and asking in vain for an authority that would protect and rescue me, I have been compelled to attempt my own defence by my own pen; the only weapon left in my hands. To use it with absolute moderation, when I was driven on by an anguish so sharp, was a hard task. One more dexterous in such contests might, by the cunning of his art, have oftener[p. 303] inflicted wounds, and received them more rarely; but, feeling myself to be fiercely attacked, and coming to the contest unskilled and alone, I threw my unprotected person into it, and, in order to free myself from the more imminent danger before me, took no thought of any that might follow. Indeed, such was the impulse by which I was driven on, that I lost sight, at once, of considerations which, at another time, might well have prevailed with me. Veneration for public authority, respect for official station, the private affections of friendship and personal attachment,—every thing within me yielded to the love of justice, and to the earnest desire that truth and innocence should triumph over calumny and falsehood. And can I, after this, be pardoned, either by those who have assailed me, or by those who have refused me their protection? Surely it matters little. The time has come in which all disapprobation, except that of honorable men and the friends of justice, must be indifferent to me. For now that I find myself fast approaching the final limits of human life, now that I am alone and in poverty, without a home or a shelter, what remains for me to ask, beyond the glory and liberty of my country, but leave to die with the good name I have labored to earn in its service?”

At the moment when this eloquent defence of himself was published, the French, by a sudden incursion, took military possession of his native city; and he hurried for safety on board a slight vessel, hardly knowing whither his course should be directed. After suffering severely from a storm of eight days’ continuance in the Bay of Biscay, he disembarked to obtain relief at the obscure port of Vega. But his strength was gone; and on the 27th of November, within forty-eight hours from the time of his landing, he died. He was nearly sixty-eight years old.

[p. 304]Jovellanos left behind him few men, in any country, of a greater elevation of mind, and fewer still of a purer or more irreproachable character. Whatever he did was for Spain and his fellow-men, to whose service he devoted himself alike in the days of his happiness and of his suffering;—in his influence over the school of Salamanca, when he exhorted them to raise the tone of their poetry, no less than in the war-cry of his odes to cheer on his countrymen in their conflict for national independence;—in his patient counsels for the cause of education, when he was an exile in Asturias or a prisoner in Majorca, no less than in the exercise of his authority as a magistrate and a minister of state to Charles the Fourth, and as the head of the government at Seville. He lived, indeed, in times of great trouble, but his virtues were equal to the trials that were laid upon them, and when he died, in a wretched and comfortless inn, he had the consolation of believing that Spain would be successful in the struggle he had assisted to lead on, and of knowing, in his own heart, what the Cortes afterwards declared to the world, that he was “a man well deserving of his country.”[360]

[p. 305]

One historical work of the reign of Charles the Fourth should not be forgotten. It was by Juan Bautista Muñoz, and was undertaken by the especial order of Charles the Third, who demanded of its author a complete history of the Spanish discoveries and conquests in America. This was in 1779. But Muñoz encountered many obstacles. The members of the Academy of History were not well disposed towards an undertaking, which seemed to fall within their own jurisdiction; and when he had finished the first portion, they subjected it, by the royal permission, to an examination, which, from its length even more than its rigor, threatened to prevent the work from being printed at all. This, however, was stopped by a summary order from the king; and the first volume, bringing down the history to the year 1500, was published in 1793. But no other followed it; and since the death of Muñoz, which occurred in 1799, when he was fifty-four years old, no attempt has been made to resume the work. It therefore remains just as he then left it,—a fragment, written, indeed, in a philosophical spirit and with a severe simplicity of style, but of small value, because it embraces so inconsiderable a portion of the subject to which it is devoted.[361]

An epic attempt of the same period is of still less importance. It is “Mexico Conquered,” an heroic poem in twenty-six books, and about twenty-five thousand lines, beginning with the demand of Cortés, at Tlascala, to be received in person by Montezuma, and end[p. 306]ing with the fall of Mexico and the capture of Guatimozin. Its author was Escoiquiz, who, as the tutor of Ferdinand, Prince of Asturias, and his adviser in the troubles of the Escurial, of Aranjuez, and of Bayonne, showed an honorable character, which at different times brought upon him the vengeance of the Prince of the Peace, of Charles the Fourth, of Bonaparte, and, at last, of Ferdinand himself.

The literary ambition of Escoiquiz, however, is of both an earlier and later date than this unhappy interval, when his upright spirit was so tried by political persecutions. In 1797 he published a translation of Young’s “Night Thoughts”; and, while he was a prisoner in France, from 1808 to 1814, he prepared a Spanish version of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which showed, at least, with what pleasure he gave himself up to letters, and what a solace they were to him under his privations and misfortunes. His “Mexico” was first printed in 1798. It is cast more carefully into an epic form than were the heroic poems that abounded in the days of the Philips, and is sustained more than they generally were by such supernatural Christian machinery as was first used with effect by Tasso. But, like them, it is not without cold, allegorical personages, who play parts too important in the action; while, on the other hand, its faithful history of events, its unity of design, and its regular proportions, are no sufficient compensation for its ill-constructed stanzas and its chronicling dulness. The history of Solís is much more interesting and poetical than this wearisome romantic epic, which owes to that historian nearly all its facts.[362]

[p. 307]

Leandro Moratin, son of the poet who flourished in the reign of Charles the Third, was, in some respects, a greater sufferer from the convulsions of the times in which he lived than Escoiquiz, and in all respects more distinguished in the world of letters. His principal success, however, was in the drama, where he must hereafter be more fully noticed. Here, therefore, it is only necessary to say, that, in his lyric and miscellaneous poetry, he was a follower of his father, modifying his manner so far under the influence of Conti, an Italian man of letters who lived long at Madrid, that, in his shorter pieces, the Italian terseness is quite apparent and gives a finish to the surface, though the material beneath may be quite Castilian. This is particularly true of his odes and sonnets, and of a striking Chorus of the Spirits of the Patriarchs of the Old Testament awaiting the Appearance of the Saviour; a solemn composition, breathing the fervent spirit of Luis of Granada. His ballads, on the other hand, though finished with great care, are more national in their tone than any thing else he has left us. But the poems that please us best and interest us most are those that show his own temper and affections; such as his “Epistle to Jovellanos,” and his “Ode on the Death of Conde,” the historian.

In none of his personal relations, however, does Moratin appear to such obvious advantage as in the difficult ones in which he stood at different times with the Prince of the Peace. To that profligate minister he owed, not only all his means for training himself as a dramatic writer, but the position in society which insured his success; and when the day of retribution[p. 308] came, and his patron fell, as he deserved to fall, Moratin, though he suffered in every way from his changed condition and the persecution of the enemies of the Prince, refused to join their cry against the crushed favorite. He said truly and nobly, “I was neither his friend, nor his counsellor, nor his servant; but all that I was I owed to him; and, although we have now-a-days a convenient philosophy, which teaches men to receive benefits without gratitude, and, when circumstances alter, to pay with reproach favors asked and received, I value my own good opinion too much to seek such infamy.” A person who acted under the impulse of principles so generous was not made for success in the reign of Ferdinand the Seventh. It is not remarkable, therefore, that nearly all the latter part of Moratin’s life was spent, either voluntarily or involuntarily, in foreign countries, and that he died at last in want and exile.[363]

The last of these miscellaneous writers of the reign of Charles the Fourth that should be mentioned is Quintana, who, like Jovellanos, Moratin, and Escoiquiz, suffered much from the violence of the revolutions through which they all passed, but, unlike them, has survived to enjoy a serene and honored old age. He was born at Madrid in 1772, but received the most effective part of his literary education at Salamanca, where he acknowledged the influence of Melendez and Cienfuegos. His profession was the law; and he began the serious business of life in the capital, kindly en[p. 309]couraged by Jovellanos. But he preferred letters; and a small society of intellectual friends, that assembled every evening at his house, soon stimulated his preference into a passion. In 1801 he ventured to print his tragedy of “The Duke of Viseo,” imitated from “The Castle Spectre” of Lewis; and in 1805 he produced on the stage his “Pelayo,” intended to rouse his countrymen to a resistance of foreign oppression, by a striking example from their own history. The former had little success; but the latter, though written according to the doctrines of the severer school, struck a chord to which the hearts of the audience gladly answered.

Meantime, between these two attempts, he published, in 1802, a small volume of poetry, almost entirely lyric, taking the same noble and patriotic tone he had taken in his successful tragedy, and showing a spirit more deep and earnest than was to be found in any of the school of Salamanca, to which, in his address to Melendez, he leaves no doubt that he now gladly associated himself. In a similar spirit he published, in 1807, a single volume containing five lives of distinguished Spaniards, who, like the Cid and the Great Captain, had successfully fought the enemies of their country at home and abroad; and almost simultaneously he prepared three volumes of selections from the best Spanish poets, accompanying them with critical notices, which, if more slight than might have been claimed from one like Quintana, and less generous in the praise they bestow than they ought to have been, are yet national in their temper, and better than any thing else of their kind in the language. Both show a too willing imitation of the French manner, and contain occasional Gallicisms; but both are written in a clear and graceful prose, both were well received, as they[p. 310] deserved to be, and both were, long afterwards, further continued by their accomplished author; the first by the addition of four important lives, and the last by extracts from the miscellaneous poets of a later period, and from several of the best of the elder epics.

But though the taste of Quintana was somewhat inclined to the literature of France, he was a Spaniard at heart, and a faithful one. Even before the French invasion he had so carefully kept himself aloof from the influence and patronage of the Prince of the Peace, that, though belonging almost strictly to the same school of poetry with Moratin, these two distinguished men lived at Madrid, imperfectly known to each other, and in fact as heads of different literary societies, whose intercourse was not so kindly as it should have been. But the moment the revolution of 1808 broke out, Quintana sprang to the place for which he felt himself called. He published at once his effective “Odes to Emancipated Spain”; he threw out, in the journals of the time, whatever he thought would excite his countrymen to resist their invaders; he became the secretary to the Cortes and to the regency; and he wrote many of the powerful proclamations, manifestos, and addresses that distinguished so honorably the career of the different administrations to which he belonged during their struggle for national independence. In short, he devoted all that he possessed of talent or fortune to the service of his country in the day of its sorest trial.

But he was ill rewarded for it. Much of what had been done by the representatives of the Spanish people in the name of Ferdinand the Seventh, during his forced detention in France, was unwelcome to that shortsighted monarch; and, as soon as he returned to Madrid, in 1814, a persecution was begun of those who[p. 311] had most contributed to the adoption of these unwelcome measures. Among the more obnoxious persons was Quintana, who was thrown into prison in the fortress of Pamplona, and remained there six miserable years, interdicted from the use of writing-materials, and cut off from all intercourse with his friends. The changes of 1820 unexpectedly released him, and raised him for a time to greater distinction than he had enjoyed before. But, three years later, another political revolution took from him all his employments and influence; and he retired to Estremadura, where he occupied himself with letters till new changes and the death of the king restored him to the old public offices he had filled so well, adding to his former honors that of a peer of the realm. But from the days when he first attracted public regard by his noble Odes on the Ocean, and on the beneficent expedition sent to America with the great charity of Vaccination, letters have been his chosen employment;—his pride, when he cheered on his countrymen to resist oppression; his consolation in prison and in exile; his crown of honor in an honored old age.[364]

The most considerable literary movement of the eighteenth century in Spain, and the one that best marks the poetical character of the entire period, is that relating to the theatre, which it was earnestly attempted to subject to the rules then prevailing on the French stage. Intimations of such a design are found in the reign of Philip the Fifth, as soon as the War of the Succession was closed. The Marquis of San Juan began, in 1713, with a translation of the “Cinna” of Corneille;—the first tragedy under the French rules that appeared in the Spanish language, and one that was probably selected for this distinction, because it was well suited to the condition of a country, that had so much reason to seek the clemency of its prince in favor of many distinguished persons, whom the civil war had led to resist his power.[365] But it was never rep[p. 313]resented, and was soon forgotten. Cañizares, the last of the elder race of dramatists that showed any of the old spirit, yielded more than once to the new school of taste, and regarded his “Sacrifice of Iphigenia”—an absurd play, for which the “Iphigénie” of Racine is very little responsible—as an imitation of the French school.[366] Neither these, however, nor plays of an irregular and often vulgar cast, like those written by Diego de Torres, professor of natural philosophy, by Lobo, the military officer, and by Salvo, the tailor, obtained any permanent favor, or were able to constitute foundations on which to reconstruct a national drama. As far as any thing was heard on the public stage worthy of its pretensions, it was the works of the old masters and of their poor imitators, Cañizares and Zamora.[367]

The Spanish theatre, in fact, was now at its lowest ebb, and wholly in the hands of the populace, from whom it had always received much of its character, and[p. 314] who had been its faithful friends in the days of its trial and adversity. Nor could its present condition fairly claim a higher patronage. All Spanish plays acted for public amusement in Madrid were still represented, as they had been in the seventeenth century, in open court-yards, with galleries or corridors that surrounded them. To these court-yards there was no covering except in case of a shower, and then the awning stretched over them was so imperfect, that, if the rain continued, and those of the spectators who were always compelled to stand during the performance were too numerous to find shelter under the projecting seats of the corridors, the exhibition was broken up for the day, and the crowd driven home. There was hardly any pretence of scenery; the performance always took place in the day-time; and the price of admission, which was collected in money at the door, did not exceed a few farthings for each spectator.

The second queen of Philip the Fifth, Isabel Farnese, who had been used to the enjoyment of all kinds of scenic exhibitions in Italy, was not satisfied with this state of things. Finding an ill-arranged theatre, in which an Italian company had sometimes acted, she caused material additions to be made to it, and required regular operas to be brought out for her amusement from 1737. The change was an important one. The two old court-yards took the alarm. First one and then the other began to erect a new and more commodious structure for theatrical entertainments; and as they had been each other’s rivals for a century and a half in the awkwardness of their arrangements, no less than in their claims for public patronage, so now they became rivals in a struggle for improvement. Under such impulses, the new “Theatre of the Cross” was finished in 1743, and that of “The Prince,” in 1745.

[p. 315]But, in most respects, there was little change. True to the traditions of their origin, the new structures were still called court-yards, and their boxes, rooms;—the cazuela, or “stewpan,” was still kept for the women, who sat there veiled like nuns, but acting very little as if they were such;—the Alcalde de Corte, or Judge of the Municipality, still appeared in the proscenium, with his two clerks behind him, to keep the peace or bear record to its breach;—Semiramis wore a hooped petticoat and high-heeled shoes, and Julius Cæsar was assassinated in a curled periwig and velvet court coat, with a feathered Spanish hat under his arm. The old spirit, therefore, it is plain, prevailed, however great might be the improvements made in the external arrangements and architecture of the theatres.

One cause of this was the exclusive favor shown to the opera by two Italian queens, and encouraged by the new political relations of Spain with Italy. The theatre of the Buen Retiro, where Calderon had so often triumphed, was fitted up with unwonted magnificence, by Farinelli, the first singer of his time, who had been brought to the Spanish court in order to soothe the melancholy of Philip the Fifth, and who still continued there, enjoying the especial protection of Ferdinand the Sixth. Luzan translated Metastasio’s “Clemency of Titus” for the opening of the new and gorgeous saloon in 1747; and both then, and for a considerable period afterwards, all that the resources of the court could command in poetry and music, or in the show and pomp of theatrical machinery, was lavished on an exotic, which at last failed to take healthy root in the soil of the country.[368]

[p. 316]

Meantime the national theatre, neglected by the court and the higher classes, was given up to such writers as Francisco de Castro, an actor who sought the applause of the lowest part of his audience by vulgar farces,[369] and Thomas de Añorbe, the chaplain of a nunnery at Madrid, whose “Paolino,” announced as “in the French fashion,” provoked the just ridicule of Luzan, and whose “Virtue conquers Fate,” if no less extravagant, has the merit of being an attack on astrology and a belief in planetary influences.[370] With the success of such absurdities, however, scholars and men of taste seem to have grown desperate. Montiano, a Biscayan gentleman, high in office at court, and a member of the Academy of Good Taste, that met at the house of the Countess of Lemos, led the way in an attack upon them. He began, in 1750, with a tragedy on the Roman story of Virginia, which he intended should be a model for Spanish serious theatrical compositions, and which he accompanied with a long and well-written discourse, showing how far Bermudez, Cueva, Virues, and a few more of the old masters, had been willing to be governed by doctrines similar to his own.

The tragedy itself, which comes like a sort of appendix to this discussion, and seems intended to illustrate and enforce its opinions, is entirely after the model of the French school, and especially after Racine;—all the rules, as they are technically called, including that which requires the stage never to be left vacant during[p. 317] the continuance of an act, being rigorously observed. But the “Virginia” is no less cold than it is regular, and, like the waters of the Alps, its very purity betrays the frozen region from which it has descended. Its versification, which consists of unrhymed iambics, is as far as possible removed from the warmth and freedom of the ballad style in the elder drama; its whole movement is languid; and the catastrophe, from the fear of shocking the spectator by a show of blood on the stage, turns out, in fact, to be no catastrophe at all. No effort, it is believed, was made to bring it upon the stage, and as a printed poem it produced no real effect on public opinion.

Montiano, however, was not discouraged. In 1753 he published another critical discourse and another tragedy, with similar merits and similar defects, taking for its subject the reign and death of Athaulpho, the Goth, as they are found in the old chronicles. But this, too, like its predecessor, was never acted, and both are now rarely read.[371]

The earliest comedy within the French rules that ap[p. 318]peared in the Spanish language was the translation of Lachaussée’s “Préjugé à la Mode” by Luzan, which was printed in 1751.[372] It judiciously preserved the national asonantes, or imperfect rhymes, throughout, and was followed, in 1754, by the “Athalie” of Racine, rendered with much taste, principally into blank verse, by Llaguno y Amirola, Secretary of the Academy of History. But the first original Spanish comedy formed on French models was the “Petimetra,” or the Female Fribble, by Moratin the elder. It was printed in 1762, and was preceded by a dissertation, in which, while the merits of the schools of Lope and Calderon are imperfectly acknowledged, their defects are exhibited in the strongest relief, and the impression left, in relation to the old masters, is of the most unfavorable character.

In the play itself, a similar kind of deference is shown to the popular prejudices and feelings, which adhered faithfully to the old drama and to the miserable imitations of it that continued to be produced. It is divided into the three jornadas to which the public had so long been wonted, and is written in the national manner, sometimes with full rhymes, and sometimes only with asonantes. But the compromise was not accepted by those to whom it was offered. The principal character, Doña Gerónima, is feebly drawn; and, though the versification and style are always easy, and sometimes beautiful, the attempt to reconcile the irregular genius of the elder comedy with what Moratin, on his title-page, calls “the rigor of art” was a failure. A corresponding effort which he made the next year in tragedy,[p. 319] taking the story of Lucretia for his subject, and adopting even more fully the French conventions, was not more successful. Neither of them obtained the distinction of being publicly represented.

That honor, however, was gained in 1770, with much difficulty, by Moratin’s “Hormesinda,” the first original drama, under the canons that governed Corneille and Racine, which ever appeared in a public theatre in Spain. It is founded on events connected with the Arab invasion and the achievements of Pelayo, and is written, like the “Lucretia,” in that irregular verse, partly rhymed and partly not, which in Spanish poetry is called silva, and is intended to have, more than any other, the air of improvisation.

The partial success of this drama, which, notwithstanding an improbable plot, deserved all the favor it received, induced its author, in 1777, to write his third tragedy, “Guzman the True,” dedicating it to his patron, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, who was a descendant of that famous nobleman, and who, a few years before, had himself translated the “Iphigénie” of Racine into Spanish. The well-known character of the hero, who chose rather to have his son sacrificed by the Moors than to surrender the fortress of Tarifa, if it is not drawn with the vigor of the old Castilian chronicles or of the drama of Guevara, is exhibited, at least, with a well-sustained consistency, that gives token of more poetical power than any thing else produced by its author for the theatre. But this is its only real merit; and the last tragedy of Moratin was, on the whole, no more successful, and no more deserving of success, than the first.

Cadahalso, the friend whom we have already noticed as much under the influence of Moratin, went one step[p. 320] further in his imitation of the French masters. His “Don Sancho Garcia,” a regular, but feeble, tragedy, printed in 1771 and afterwards acted, is written in long lines and rhymed couplets; an innovation which could hardly fail to be accounted monotonous on a stage, one of whose chief luxuries had so long been a wild variety of measures. Nor did more favor follow an attempt of Sebastian y Latre to adjust to the theories of the time two old dramas, still often represented,—the one by Roxas and the other by Moreto,—which he forced within the pale of the three unities, and for the public representations of one of which, Aranda, the minister of state, paid the charges. Like the subsequent attempts of Trigueros to accommodate some of Lope de Vega’s plays to the same system of opinions, it was entirely unsuccessful. The difference between the two different schools was so great, and the effort to force them together so violent, that enough of the spirit and grace of the originals could not be found in these modernized imitations to satisfy the demands of any audience that could be collected to listen to them.[373]

[p. 321]

Yriarte, better known as a didactic poet and fabulist, enjoys the distinction of having produced the first regular original comedy that was publicly represented in Spain. He began very young, with a play which he did not afterwards think fit to place among his collected works; and, beside translations from Voltaire and Destouches, and three or four attempts of less consequence, he wrote two full-length original comedies, which were better than any thing previously produced by the school to which he belonged. One of them, called “The Flattered Youth,” appeared in 1778, and the other, “The Ill-bred Miss,” ten years later;—the first being on the subject of a son spoiled by a foolishly indulgent mother, and the second on the daughter of a rich man equally spoiled by the carelessness and neglect of her father. Both are divided into three acts, and written in the imperfect rhyme and short verses always grateful to Castilian ears; and both are marked by good character-drawing and a pleasant, easy manner, not abounding in wit nor sensibly deficient in it. But, except these plays of Yriarte and Moratin, and an unfortunate one by Melendez Valdes in 1784,—founded on Camacho’s wedding, in “Don Quixote,” and containing occasionally gentle and pleasing pastoral poetry which ill agrees with the rude jesting of Sancho,—nothing that deserves notice was done for comedy in the latter part of the reign of Charles the Third.[374]

Tragedy fared still worse. The “Numantia Destroyed,” written by Ayala, a man of learning and the regular censor of the public theatres of Madrid, was acted in 1775. Its subject is the same with that of[p. 322] the “Numantia” by Cervantes; but the horrors of the siege it describes are not brought home to the sympathies of the reader by instances of individual suffering, as they are in the elder dramatist, and therefore produce much less effect. As an acting drama, however, it is not without merit. Its versification, which is, again, an attempt at a compromise with the public by giving alternate asonantes, but attaching them to the long-drawn lines of the French theatre, is not, indeed, fortunate; but the style is otherwise rich and vigorous, and the tone elevated. Perhaps its ardent expressions of patriotic feeling, and its fierce denunciations of foreign oppression, have done as much to keep it on the stage as its intrinsic poetical merits.

The “Raquel” of Huerta, printed in 1778, three years after the “Numantia,” is not so creditable to the author, and produced a less lasting impression on the public. The story—that of the Jewess of Toledo, which has been so often treated by Spanish poets—is taken too freely from a play of Diamante; and though Huerta has, in some respects, given the materials he found there a better arrangement, and a more grave and sonorous versification, he has diminished the spirit and naturalness of the action by constraining it within the hard conventions he prescribed to himself, and has rendered the whole drama so uninteresting, that, notwithstanding its considerable reputation at first, it was soon forgotten.[375]

The first real success of any thing in the French style on the Spanish stage, though not in the classical forms prescribed by Boileau and Racine, was obtained by[p. 323] Jovellanos. Early in life he had ventured a tragedy, entitled “Pelayo,” in the same measure with Ayala’s “Numantia,” and on nearly the same subject with the “Hormesinda” of the elder Moratin. But the philosophical statesman, though he wrote good lyric verse, was not a tragic poet. He was, however, something better;—he was a really good man, and his philanthropy led him, in 1773, to write his “Honored Culprit,” a play, intended to rebuke the cruel and unavailing severity of the laws of his country against duelling, as they then existed. It is a sentimental comedy in the manner of Diderot’s “Natural Son”; and, beside that it has the honor of being the first attempt of the kind on the Spanish stage, it has that of being more fortunate than any of its successors. The story on which it is founded is that of a gentleman, who, after repeatedly refusing a challenge, kills, in a secret duel, the infamous husband of the lady he afterwards marries; and, being subsequently led to confess his crime in order to save a friend, who is arrested as the guilty party, he is condemned to death by a rigorous judge, who unexpectedly turns out to be his own father, and is saved from execution, but not from severe punishment, only by the royal clemency.

How many opportunities for scenes of the most painful interest such a story affords is obvious at the first glance. Jovellanos has used them skilfully, because he has done it in the simplest and most direct manner, with great warmth of kindly feeling, and in a style whose idiomatic purity is not the least of its attractions. “The Honored Culprit,” therefore, was at once successful, and when well acted, though its poetical power is small, it can hardly be listened to without tears. It was first produced in one of the royal theatres, without[p. 324] the knowledge of its author; then, spreading throughout Spain, it was acted at Cadiz at the same time both in French and Spanish, and, at last, became familiar on the stages of France and Germany. Such wide success had long been unknown to any thing in Spanish literature.[376]

But from the time when the first attempt was made to introduce regular plays in the French manner upon the Spanish stage, an active contest had been going on, which, though the advantage had of late been on the side of the innovators, did not seem likely to be soon determined. In 1762, Moratin the elder published what he called “The Truth told about the Spanish Stage”;—three spirited pamphlets, in which he attacked the old drama generally, but above all the autos sacramentales, not denying the poetical merit of those by Calderon, but declaring that such wild, coarse, and blasphemous exhibitions, as they generally were, ought not to be tolerated in a civilized and religious community. So far as the autos were concerned, Moratin was successful. They were prohibited by a royal edict, June 17, 1765; and though, even in the nineteenth century, it can hardly be said that they have been entirely driven out of the villages, where they have been the delight of the mass of the people from a period before that of Alfonso the Wise, yet in Madrid and the larger cities of Spain they have never been heard since they were first forbidden.[377]

[p. 325]

But this was as far as Moratin could prevail. In the public secular theatre, generally, his poetry and wit produced no effect. There, two riotous parties in the two audiences of Madrid—distinguishing themselves by favors worn in their hats and led on by vulgar friars and rude mechanics, making up in spirit what they wanted in decency, and readily uniting to urge an open war against all further innovations—effectually prevented any of the regular dramas that were written from being represented in their presence, until 1770. The old masters they partly tolerated; especially Calderon, Moreto, and the dramatists of the latter part of the seventeenth century; but the popular favorites were Ibañez, Lobera, Vicente Guerrero, a play-actor, Julian de Castro, who wrote ballads for the street beggars and died in a hospital, and others of the same class; all as vulgar as the populace they delighted.

After Aranda ceased to be minister, in 1773, this state of things was somewhat modified, without being materially improved. Under his administration, the theatres in the royal residences had been opened for tragedy and comedy; and translations from the French had been acted before the court in a manner suited to their subjects. The two popular theatres of the capital, too, had not escaped his regard, and under his influence had been provided with better scenery; and, from 1768, gave representations in the evening.[378]

Still, every thing was in a very low state. A blacksmith was the reigning critic to be consulted by those[p. 326] who sought a hearing on either stage, and the more regular plays, whether translations that had been acted with success at court, or tragedies and comedies of the poets already noticed, made a strange confusion with those of the old masters, which were still sometimes heard, and those of the favorites of the mob, whose works prevailed over all others in the theatrical repertories and in the general regard. But, whatever might be produced and performed, the intervals between the acts, and much time before and after the principal piece, were filled up with tonadillas, seguidillas, ballads, and all the forms of entremeses, saynetes, and dances, that had been common in the last century or invented in the present one,—an act in a serious and poetical play being sometimes divided, in order to give place to one or another of them, and gratify an audience that seemed to grow more and more impatient of every thing except popular farce.[379]

In this confusion of the old and the new,—of what was stiff, formal, and foreign with what was rudest and most lawless in the national drama at home,—a single writer appeared, who, from the mere force of natural talent, fell instinctively into a tone not unworthy of the theatre, and yet one that obtained for him a degree of favor long denied to persons of more poetical accomplishments. This was Ramon de la Cruz, a gentleman of family and an officer of the government at Madrid, who was born in 1731, and from 1765 to the time of his death, at the end of the century, constantly amused the audiences of the capital with dramas, written in any form likely to please at the palace, on the public stages of the city, or in the houses of the nobility, who, like the Duchess[p. 327] of Ossuna, or Aranda, the minister of state, were able to indulge in such a luxury at home.

In the whole, he wrote about three hundred dramatic compositions, but printed less than a third of that number; most of those he published being farces designed to produce a merely popular effect. They fill ten volumes, and are all in the short, national measure of the old drama, mingled occasionally, though rarely, with other forms of verse. They bear, however, very different names; some of them characteristic and some of them not. A few he calls “Dramatic Caprices”; apparently because no more definite title would be suited to their undefined character. Some he calls “Saynetes to be sung,” and some “Burlesque Tragedies.” Others have no names at all, not even for their personages, except those of the actors who represented the different parts. While yet others pass under the old designations of loas, entremeses, and zarzuelas, though often with a character which it would have been impossible for the early representations bearing the same names to assume. Occasionally, as in the case of the “Clementina,” he takes pains to observe all the rules of the French drama; but they sit very uneasily upon him, and he seldom submits to them. His great merit is almost entirely confined to his short farces; and therefore, when Duran, to whom the Spanish theatre owes so much, undertook to publish what was best of the works of La Cruz, he rejected all the rest, and, taking his materials both from manuscript sources and from what had been already published, gives us merely a hundred and ten proper “Saynetes.”

Their subjects are various, and they are very unequal in length; but, amidst all their varieties, one principle gave them a prevailing character and insured their suc[p. 328]cess. They are founded on the manners of the middling and lower classes of the city, which they reflect freshly and faithfully, whether their materials are sought in the tertulias or evening parties of persons in a decent condition of life, where the demure Abate and the authorized lover of the mistress of the house contend for influence; or in the trim walks of the Prado, and among the loungers of the Puerta del Sol, where the fashion of the court is jostled by the humors of the people; or in the Lavapies and the Maravillas, where the lowest classes, with their picturesque dresses and unchanging manners, reign supreme and unquestioned. But, under all circumstances and in all situations, Ramon de la Cruz, in this class of his dramas, is attractive and amusing; and, though there is seldom any thought of dramatic skill in his combinations, and often no attempt at a catastrophe,—though his style is any thing but correct, and he is wholly careless of finish in his versification,—yet his farces so abound in wit and faithful delineations of character, they are so true to the manners they intend to represent, and so entirely national in their tone, that they seem expressly made for a pleasant and appropriate accompaniment to the longer dramas of Lope and Calderon, in whose popular spirit they are most successfully written.[380]

[p. 329]

Meanwhile the press was not so inactive as it had been. Sedano published his “Jael,” taken from the story in the book of Judges; Lassala his “Iphigenia”; Trigueros his “Tradesmen of Madrid”; and Cortés his “Atahualpa”; the last two having been written, and successful, at the same festivities of 1784 for which Melendez composed his “Marriage of Camacho,” and failed. Cienfuegos, too, a poet of more original power than either of them, wrote his “Pitaco,” which opened for him the doors of the Spanish Academy; his “Idomeneo,” from which, in imitation of Alfieri, he excluded the passion of love; and his “Countess of Castile,” and his “Zoraida,” taken from the old traditions of his country’s wars and feuds; each giving proof of talent, but of talent rather lyric than dramatic, and each showing too anxious an adherence to Greek models, which were particularly unsuitable for the Zoraida, whose scene is laid in the gardens of the Alhambra.[381] But all of them—so far at least as the public stage is concerned—have been long since forgotten.

On the other hand, La Huerta, in 1785, published fourteen volumes of the old full-length plays, and one volume of the old “Entremeses”; a work intended to vindicate the national theatre of Spain in the preceding century, and to place it as high as that of the rest of Europe, or higher. But he was ill fitted for his task. A selection, designed to illustrate the great masters of the Spanish stage, which, to say nothing of other mistakes, wholly omitted Lope de Vega, began with a capital defect; and this circumstance, together with the[p. 330] arrogant tone of the editor in his Prefaces, and the contradiction to his present opinions afforded by the example of his own “Raquel,” which is entirely in the French manner, and to his translations of the “Electra” of Sophocles and the “Zaïre” of Voltaire, which were obviously made to defend the French school, prevented his “Teatro Hespañol” from producing the effect that might otherwise have followed its not ill-timed appearance. Still it was a work of consequence, and was afterwards acknowledged to be such by the public.[382]

The discussions it provoked were of more direct importance, and tended to infuse new life into the theatre itself. Such discussions had been begun immediately after the publication of the first tragedy by Montiano, in 1750,—a date which may be regarded as the dividing point in the history of the Spanish stage during the eighteenth century,—and they were now resumed with great activity, partly in consequence of the increasing interest in the national drama generally, and partly in consequence of the personal temper of La Huerta himself. One immediate result of this state of things was a great increase in the number of plays, of which at least ten times more were written in the last half of the century than in the first; and if there were less improvement in the condition of the theatre than[p. 331] might have been anticipated from such competition, still, as we have seen, poets and men of genius, like Ramon de la Cruz, were stirred by the movement, and far-sighted spirits, like Jovellanos, augured well for the future.[383]

The great obstacle to the success of better dramas lay in a number of writers, who pandered to the bad taste of the low and vulgar audiences of their time. Among the more prominent and successful of these were Valladares and Zavala. The first wrote above a hundred dramas on all kinds of subjects, tragic and comic, prefixing to his “Emperor Albert” a discourse in the spirit of Huerta, to defend the Spanish drama from the attacks of its French neighbours. The other, Zavala, wrote about half as many, some of which, like his “Victims of Love,” are in the sentimental style, while others, like three on the history of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, are as extravagant as any thing in the worst of the dramatists he sought to imitate. Both used the old versification, and intended to humor the public taste in its demands for a vulgar and extravagant drama; though occasionally, as in “The Triumphs of Love and Friendship,” by Zavala, they wrote in prose; and occasionally, as in “The Defence of Virtue,” they showed themselves[p. 332] willing to submit to the rules of the French stage. In fact, they had neither poetical principles nor poetical talent, and wrote only to amuse a populace more ignorant and rude than themselves.

Somewhat better than either of these last, and certainly more successful than either with the better classes of his contemporaries, was Comella. Like Valladares, his fertility was great; and the ease with which he wrote, and the ingenuity with which he invented new and striking situations, seemed to have the same charm for his audiences which they had had for the audiences of Lope and Calderon. But, unhappily, Comella had not the genius of the old masters. His plots are as involved, and sometimes as interesting, as theirs; but, generally, they are, to a most extravagant degree, wild and absurd. Even when he deals with subjects as well known as Christina of Sweden, Louis the Fourteenth, and Frederic the Great, he seems to have no regard for truth, probability, or consistency. His versification, too, is unfortunate. In form it is, indeed, such as had always been insisted on where the popular voice of Castile has borne sway; but it lacks variety, as well as richness and strength. Still, his romances in dialogue were found so interesting, and there was so much of tender and honorable feeling in the tone of his sentiments and the incidents of his plots, that above a hundred of his wild dramas—some of them in prose, but more in verse, some on historical subjects, but many made out of love-stories of his own invention—were received with applause, and proved more profitable to the theatres of Madrid than any thing else they could offer to the multitude on whom they depended for their existence.[384]

[p. 333]

But while Comella was at the height of his reputation, a formidable antagonist, both to himself and to the whole class of writers he represented, appeared in the person of Moratin the younger, son of that poet who first produced on the Spanish stage an original drama written according to the French doctrines. He was born in 1760. To insure for the child a subsistence he had with difficulty earned for himself, his father placed him as an apprentice to a jeweller, at whose trade the young man continued to work till he was twenty-three years old,—the latter part of the time in order to support his mother, who had been left a widow.

But his natural disposition for poetry was too strong to be controlled by the hard circumstances of his situation. When seven years old he had written verses, and at eighteen he obtained the second prize offered by the Royal Spanish Academy for a poem to commemorate the taking of Granada,—a circumstance which astonished nobody more than it did his own family, for he had written it secretly, and presented it under a feigned name. Another success of the same sort, two years later, attracted more attention to the poor young jeweller; and at last, in 1787, by the kind intervention of Jovellanos, he was made secretary to the Spanish embassy at Paris, and accompanied the ambassador, Count Cabarrus, to that capital. There he remained two years, and, during that time, became acquainted with Goldoni, and entered into relations with other men of letters, that determined the direction of his life and the character of his drama.

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On his return to Madrid, he obtained the patronage of Don Manuel Godoy, afterwards the all-powerful Prince of the Peace; and from this moment his fortune seemed certain. He was sent, at the public charge, to study the theatres of Germany and England, as well as those of Italy and France; he had pensions and places given him at home; and, while an honorable occupation in the department of Foreign Affairs, which awaited his return, insured him a distinguished position in society, he had still leisure left for that cultivation of letters which he prized above all his prosperity and all his official honors.

This happy state of things continued till the French invasion of 1808. His public relations then became a misfortune. The flood of events swept him from his place, as it did his patron; and, without becoming in any degree false to the interests of his country, he was so far implicated in those of the new government, that, when Ferdinand the Seventh was restored to the throne, Moratin was treated for a time with great rigor. But this, too, passed away, and he was again protected and favored. Still he suffered. His friends were in exile, and he felt solitary without them. He went back to France, and, though once afterwards he returned with a fond longing to the land of his birth, he found every thing so changed by the triumphant despotism, that it was no longer Spain to him, and he established himself finally at Paris, where he died in 1828. He was buried near Molière, whom in life he had honored and imitated.

When Moratin began his career as a dramatic poet, he found obstacles to his success on every side. His father’s tragedy of “Hormesinda” had been produced on the stage only in consequence of the ministerial pro[p. 335]tection of the Count of Aranda, and in opposition to the judgment and fears of the actors.[385] Cienfuegos, who had followed his example, was able with difficulty to obtain a hearing for two out of his five dramas;—one of them being listened to with partial favor because it was on a subject familiar to all Spaniards from the days of the old ballads, and always welcome to their hearts. Quintana, whose name was early respected and his influence uniformly great, had failed with “The Duke of Viseo.” Others were discouraged by such examples, and made no effort to obtain the public notice where there was so little prospect of success.

This was the condition of the stage, when the younger Moratin appeared as a candidate before the audiences of Madrid. The new school had gained some ground, and the living representatives of the old one were none of them more distinguished than Comella; but the taste of the public was not changed, and the managers of the theatre were obliged, as well as inclined, to yield to its authority and humor its fancies.

Moratin determined, however, to tread in the footsteps of his father, for whose example and memory he always felt the sincerest reverence. He therefore wrote his first comedy, “The Old Husband and the Young Wife,” quite within the rules, finishing every part of it with the greatest exactness, but dividing it, as the old Spanish plays were divided, into three acts, and using throughout the old short verse which was always popular. But when, in 1786, he offered his comedy for representation, the simplicity of the action, so unlike the involved plots on which the common people still loved to exercise their extraordinary ingenuity, and the[p. 336] very quietness and decorum that reigned throughout it, made the actors alarmed for its success. Objections were made, and these, with other untoward circumstances, prevented it from being brought out for four years. When it finally appeared, it was received with a moderate applause, which satisfied neither of the extreme parties into which the audiences at Madrid were then divided, and yet was not perhaps unjust to the comedy, whose action is somewhat cold and languid, though its poetical merits, in other respects, are far from being inconsiderable.

But, whatever may have been the effect on the public, the effect on its author was decisive. He had been heard. His merit had been, in part at least, acknowledged; and he now determined to bring the pretensions of the popular dramatists, who were disgracing the stage, to the test of a public trial on the stage itself. For this purpose, he wrote his “New Play,” as he called it, which is an exposition of the motives of a penniless author for composing one of the noisy, extravagant dramas then constantly acted with applause, and an account of its first representation;—the whole related by the author himself and his friends, in a coffee-house contiguous to the theatre, at the very moment the fatal representation is supposed to be going on.

It is in two acts; and the catastrophe—which consists of the confusion of the author and his family at the failure of his performance—is brought on with skill, and with an effect much greater than the simplicity of the action had promised. The piece, therefore, was received with a favor which even Moratin and his friends had not anticipated. The poet, who is its victim, was recognized at once to be Comella. Some of the inferior characters, whether justly or not, were ap[p. 337]propriated to other persons who figured at the time, and the “New Play” was acknowledged to be a brilliant satire;—severe indeed, but well merited and happily applied. From this time, therefore, which was 1792, Moratin, notwithstanding the exasperated opposition of the adherents of the old school, had secured for himself a permanent place on the national stage, and, what is more remarkable, this little drama, almost without a regular action and founded on interests purely local, was, for the sake of its wit and originality, translated and successfully represented both in France and Italy.[386]

“The Baron,” which is in two acts and in verse, was at first prepared to be sung; and, without the permission of the author, was altered to an acting drama and performed in public during his absence from Spain. On his return, he improved it by material additions, and produced it again in 1803. It is the least effective of his theatrical performances; but it triumphed over a cabal, which supported a drama written on the same subject and represented at the same time, in order to interfere with its success.

At the moment Moratin was making arrangements for bringing out “The Baron,” he was occupied with the careful preparation of another comedy in verse, that was destined still further to increase his reputation. This was “The Female Hypocrite,” which was written as early as 1791, and was soon afterwards represented in private, but which was not finished and acted publicly till 1804. It is an excellent specimen of character[p. 338]-drawing; the two principal personages being a girl, made, by the severity of her family, to assume the appearance of being very religious, while her cousin, who is well contrasted with her, is rendered frank and winning by an opposite treatment. The very subject, however, was one that brought Moratin upon dangerous ground, and his play was forbidden by the Inquisition. But that once formidable body was now little more than an engine of state; so that the authority of the Prince of the Peace was not only sufficient to prevent any disagreeable consequences to Moratin himself, but was able soon afterwards to indulge the public in a pleasure for which they were only the more eager, because it had for a time been interdicted.

Moratin’s last original effort on the stage was a full-length prose comedy in three acts, which he called the “Little Girl’s Consent,” and which was acted in 1806. Its general movement is extremely natural, and yet it is enlivened with a little of the intrigue and bustle that were always so much liked on the Spanish theatre. A young girl, while in the course of her education at a convent, becomes attached to a handsome officer of dragoons. Her mother, ignorant of this, undertakes to bring her home and marry her to an excellent, benevolent old gentleman, whom the daughter has never seen, but whom, out of mere weakness, she has been unable to refuse. At an inn on the road, where the younger lover falls in with them on purpose to break up this match, they all meet; and he discovers, to his dismay, that his rival is an uncle to whom he is sincerely attached, and to whom he owes many obligations. The mistakes and intrigues of the night they pass together at this inn give great life to the action, and are full of humor; while the disinterested attachment of the young lovers[p. 339] to each other, and the benevolence of the uncle, add to the conflicting claims and relations of the different parties a charm quite original in itself, and very effective in its exhibition. The play ends by the discovery of the real state of the daughter’s heart, and the renunciation of all the pretensions of the uncle, who makes his nephew his heir.

Nothing on the Spanish stage had been so well received for a long period. It was acted twenty-six nights successively to audiences who were in the habit of demanding novelties constantly; and then it was stopped only because Lent came to shut up the theatres. No criticism appeared except to praise it. The triumph of Moratin was complete.

But he was not destined long to enjoy it. The troubles of his country were already begun, and in three years the French were its temporary masters. He prepared, indeed, afterwards two spirited translations from Molière, with alterations that made them more attractive to his countrymen; one from the “École des Maris,” which was acted in 1812, and the other from the “Médecin Malgré Lui,” which was acted in 1814; but, except these and an unfortunate prose version of Shakspeare’s “Hamlet,” which was printed in 1798, but never performed, he wrote nothing for the theatre except the five comedies already noticed. These, if they form no very broad foundation for his fame, seem yet to constitute one on which it may rest safely; and, if they have failed to educate a school strong enough to drive out the bad imitations of the old masters that have constantly pressed upon them, have yet been able to keep their own place, little disturbed by the changes of the times.[387]

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That the Spanish drama, during the century which elapsed between the establishment of the House of Bourbon on the throne and the temporary expulsion of that house from Spain by the arms of Bonaparte, had, in some respects, made progress, cannot be doubted. More convenient and suitable structures for its exhibitions had been erected, not only in the capital, but in all the principal cities of the kingdom. New and various forms of dramatic composition had been introduced, which, if not always consistent with the demands of the national genius, nor often encouraged by the general favor, had still been welcome to the greater part of the more cultivated classes, and served both to excite attention to the fallen state of the theatre generally, and to stir the thoughts of men for its restoration. Actors, too, of extraordinary merit had from time to time appeared, like Damian de Castro, for whom Zamora and Cañizares wrote parts; Maria L’ Advenant, who delighted Signorelli in the higher characters of Calderon and Moreto; the Tirana, whose tragic powers astonished the practised taste of Cumberland, the English dramatist; and Maiquez, who enjoyed the friendship and admiration of nearly all the Spanish men of letters in his time.[388]

But still the old spirit and life of the drama of the[p. 341] seventeenth century were not there. The audiences, who were as unlike those of the cavalier times of Philip the Fourth as were the rude exhibitions they preferred to witness, did as much to degrade the theatre as was done by the poets they patronized and the actors they applauded. The two schools were in presence of each other continually struggling for the victory, and the multitude seemed rather to rejoice in the uproar, than desire so to use it as to promote changes beneficial to the theatre. On the one side, extravagant and absurd dramas in great numbers, full of noise, show, and low buffoonery, were offered with success. On the other, meagre sentimental comedies, and stiff, cold translations from the French, were forced, in almost equal numbers, upon the actors by the voices of those from whose authority or support they could not entirely emancipate themselves. And between the two, and with the consent of all, the Inquisition and the censors forbade the representation of hundreds of the dramas of the old masters, and among them not a few which still give reputation to Calderon and Lope. The eighteenth century, therefore, so far as the Spanish theatre is concerned, is entirely a period of revolution and change; and while, at its conclusion, we perceive that the old national drama can hardly hope to be restored to its ancient rights, it is equally plain that a drama founded on the doctrines taught by Luzan, and practised by the Moratins, is not destined to take its place.[389]

The reign of Charles the Fourth was not one in which a literary contest could be carried on with the freedom that alone can render such contests the means of intellectual progress. His profligate favorite, the Prince of the Peace, during a long administration of the affairs of the country, overshadowed every thing with an influence hardly less fatal to what he patronized than to what he oppressed. The revolution in France, first resisted, as it was elsewhere, and then corruptly conciliated, struck the same terror at Madrid that it did at Rome and Naples; and, while its open defiance of every thing Christian filled the hearts of a large majority of the Spanish people with a horror greater than it inspired even in Italy, not a few were led away by it from their time-honored feelings of religion and loyalty, and prepared for changes like those that were already overturning the thrones of half Europe. Amidst this confusion, and taking advantage of it, the Inquisition, grown flexible in the hands of the government as a political machine, but still renouncing none of its religious pretensions, came forth with its last “Index Expurgatorius” to meet the invasion of French[p. 344] philosophy and insubordination.[390] Acting under express instructions from the powers of the state it received against men of letters, and especially those connected with the universities, an immense number of denunciations, which, though rarely prosecuted to conviction and punishment, were still formidable enough to prevent the public expression of opinions on any subject that could endanger the social condition of the individual who ventured to entertain them. In all its worst forms, therefore, oppression, civil, political, and religious, appeared to be settling down with a new and portentous weight on the whole country. All men felt it. It seemed as if the very principle of life in the atmosphere they breathed had become tainted and unwholesome. But they felt, too, that the same atmosphere was charged with the spirit of a great revolution; and the boldest walked warily and were hushed, while they waited for changes the shock of whose fierce elements none could willingly encounter.

At last the convulsion came. In 1807, the heir apparent was brought into direct collision with the Prince of the Peace, and took measures to defend his personal rights. The affair of the Escurial followed; darker than the dark cells in which it was conceived. Ferdinand was accused, under the influence of the favorite, with a design to dethrone and murder his own father and mother; and, for a moment, Europe seemed threat[p. 345]ened with a crime which even the unscrupulous despotism of Philip the Second had not ventured to commit. This was prevented by the manly boldness and constancy of Escoiquiz. But things could not long remain in the uneasy and treacherous position in which such a rash attempt at convulsion had left them. The great revolution broke out at Aranjuez in March, 1808; Charles the Fourth abdicated in shame and terror; and Ferdinand the Seventh ascended the tottering throne of his ancestors amidst the exultation of his people. But Napoleon, then at the summit of his vast power, interfered in the troubles he had not been unwilling to foster. Under the pretext, that such fatal differences as had arisen between the father and son would disturb the affairs of Europe, he drew the royal family of Spain into his toils at Bayonne; and there, on the soil of France, the crown of the Bourbon race in Spain was ignominiously surrendered into his hands, and by him placed on the head of his brother, already king of Naples.

It was all the work of a few short weeks; and the fate of Spain seemed to be sealed with a seal that no human power would be permitted to break. But the people of that land of faith and chivalry were not forgetful of their ancient honor in this the day of their great trial. They boldly refused to ratify the treaty to which father and son had alike put their dishonored names, and sprang to arms to prevent its provisions from being fulfilled by foreign intervention. It was a fierce struggle. For nearly six years, the forces of France were spread over the country, sometimes seeming to cover the whole of it, and sometimes only small portions, but seldom exerting any real control beyond the camps they occupied and the cities they from time[p. 346] to time garrisoned. At last, in 1813, under the leading of England, the invaders were driven through the gorges of the Pyrenees; and, as a part of the great European retribution, Ferdinand the Seventh was replaced on the throne he had so weakly abdicated.

He was received by his people with a loyalty that seemed to belong to the earliest ages of the monarchy. But it was lost on him. He returned untaught by the misfortunes he had suffered, and unmoved by a fidelity which had showed itself ready to sacrifice a whole generation and its hopes to his honor and rights. As far as was possible, he restored all the forms and appliances of the old despotism, and thrust from his confidence the very men who had brought him home on their shields, and who only claimed for their country the exercise of a salutary freedom, without which he himself could not be maintained on the throne where their courage and constancy had seated him.[391] Even the Inquisition, which it had been one of the most popular acts of the French invaders to abolish, and one of the wisest acts of the national Cortes to declare incompatible with the constitution of the monarchy, was solemnly reinstated; and if, during a reign protracted through twenty sad and troubled years, any proper freedom was for a moment granted to thought, to speech, or to the press, it was only in consequence of changes over[p. 347] which the prince had no control, and of which he felt himself to be rather the victim than the author.[392]

Amidst such violence and confusion,—when men slept in armour, as they had during the Moorish contest, and knew not whether they should be waked amidst their households or amidst their enemies,—elegant letters, of course, could hardly hope to find shelter or resting-place. The grave political questions, that agitated the country and shook the foundations of society, were precisely those in which it might be foreseen, that intellectual men would take the deepest interest and expose themselves to sufferings and ruin, like the less favored masses around them. And so, in fact, it proved. Nearly every poet and prose-writer, known as such at the end of the reign of Charles the Fourth, became involved in the fierce political changes of the time;—changes so various and so opposite, that those who escaped from the consequences of one were often, on that very account, sure to suffer in the next that followed.

The young men who, during this disastrous period, were just beginning to unfold their promise, were checked at the outset of their career. Martinez de la Rosa, five years a prisoner of state on a rock in Africa before he had reached the age of thirty; Angel de Rivas, still younger, left for dead on the bloody field of Ocaña; Galiano, sentenced to the scaffold while he was earning his daily bread by daily labor as a teacher in London; Torreno, brought home on his bier, as he[p. 348] returned from his third exile; Arriaza serving in the armies of Ferdinand; Arjona and Barbero silenced; Xavier de Burgos plundered; Gallego, Xerica, Hermosilla, Mauri, Mora, Tapia;—these, and many others, all young men and full of the hopes that letters inspire in generous spirits, were seized upon by the passions of party or the demands of patriotism, and hurried into paths far from the pursuits to which their talents, their taste, and their social relations would alike have dedicated them;—pursuits on which, in fact, they had already entered, and to which they have since owed their most brilliant and enduring distinctions, as well as their truest happiness.

Those who were older, and had been before marked by success and public favor, fared still worse. The eyes of men had already been fastened upon them, and in the conflict and crush of the contending factions they were sure to suffer, as one or another prevailed in the long-protracted struggle. Jovellanos and Cienfuegos, as we have seen, were almost instantly martyrs to their patriotism. Melendez Valdes sunk a later and more miserable victim. Conde and Escoiquiz were exiled for opposite reasons. Moratin, after having faced death in the frightful form of want in his own country, survived to a fate in France hardly less to be dreaded. Quintana was cast by his ungrateful sovereign into the Bastile of Pamplona, with an apparent intention that he should perish there. To all of them the happiness of success in letters, to which they had been accustomed amidst the encouragement of their friends and countrymen, was denied;—from all, the hopes of fame seemed to be cut off. Most of them, and most of the small class to which they belonged, passed, as voluntary or involuntary exiles, beyond the limits of a country which they[p. 349] might still be compelled to love, but which they could no longer respect. The rest were silent. It was an interregnum in all elegant culture, such as no modern nation had yet seen,—not even Spain herself during the War of the Succession.

But it was not possible that such a state of things should become permanent and normal. Even while Ferdinand the Seventh was living, a movement was begun, the first traces of which are to be found among the emigrated Spaniards, who cheered with letters their exile in England and France, and whose subsequent progress, from the time when the death of that unfaithful monarch permitted them to return home, is distinctly perceptible in their own country.[393] What precise direction this movement may hereafter take, or where it may end, it is not given us to foresee. Perhaps too much of foreign influence, and too great a tendency to infuse the spirit of the North into a poetry whose nature is peculiarly Southern, may, for a time, divert it from its true course. Or perhaps the national genius, springing forward through all that opposes its instincts, and shaking off whatever encumbers it with ill-considered help, may press directly onward, and complete the canon of a literature whose forms, often only sketched by the great masters of its age of glory, remain yet to be filled out and finished in the grandeur and grace of their proper proportions.

But, whether a great advancement may soon be hoped for or not, one thing is certain. The law of progress is on Spain for good or for evil, as it is on the other na[p. 350]tions of the earth, and her destiny, like theirs, is in the hand of God, and will be fulfilled. The material resources of her soil and position are as great as those of any people that now occupies its meted portion of the globe. The mass of her inhabitants, and especially of her peasantry, has been less changed, and in many respects less corrupted, by the revolutions of the last century, than any of the nations who have pressed her borders, or contended with her power. They are the same race of men, who twice drove back the crescent from the shores of Europe, and twice saved from shipwreck the great cause of Christian civilization. They have shown the same spirit at Saragossa, that they showed two thousand years before at Saguntum. They are not a ruined people. And, while they preserve the sense of honor, the sincerity, and the contempt for what is sordid and base, that have so long distinguished their national character, they cannot be ruined.

Nor, I trust, will such a people—still proud and faithful in its less favored masses, if not in those portions whose names dimly shadow forth the glory they have inherited—fail to create a literature appropriate to a character in its nature so poetical. The old ballads will not indeed return; for the feelings that produced them are with by-gone things. The old drama will not be revived;—society, even in Spain, would not now endure its excesses. The old chroniclers themselves, if they should come back, would find no miracles of valor or superstition to record, and no credulity fond enough to believe them. Their poets will not again be monks and soldiers, as they were in the days when the influences of the old religious wars and hatreds gave both their brightest and darkest colors to the elements of social life; for the civilization that struck its roots into[p. 351] that soil has died out for want of nourishment. But the Spanish people—that old Castilian race, that came from the mountains and filled the whole land with their spirit—have, I trust, a future before them not unworthy of their ancient fortunes and fame; a future full of materials for a generous history, and a poetry still more generous;—happy if they have been taught, by the experience of the past, that, while reverence for whatever is noble and worthy is of the essence of poetical inspiration, and, while religious faith and feeling constitute its true and sure foundations, there is yet a loyalty to mere rank and place, which degrades alike its possessor and him it would honor, and a blind submission to priestly authority, which narrows and debases the nobler faculties of the soul more than any other, because it sends its poison deeper. But, if they have failed to learn this solemn lesson, inscribed everywhere, as by the hand of Heaven, on the crumbling walls of their ancient institutions, then is their honorable history, both in civilization and letters, closed for ever.

The country which now passes under the name of Spain has been subjected to a greater number of revolutions, that have left permanent traces in its population, language, and literature, than any other of the principal countries of modern Europe.[394] At different periods, within the reach of authentic record, it has been invaded and occupied by the Phœnicians, the Romans, the Goths, and the Arabs; all distinct races of men with peculiar characteristics, and forming, in their various combinations with each other or with the earlier masters of the soil, still new races hardly less separate and remarkable than themselves. From the intimate union of them all, gradually wrought by the changes and convulsions of nearly three thousand years, has arisen the present Spanish people, whose literature, extending back about seven centuries, has been examined in the preceding volumes.

But it is difficult fully to examine or understand the literature of any country, without understanding something, at least, of the original elements and history of the language in which[p. 356] it is contained, and on which no small portion of its essential character must depend; while, at the same time, a knowledge of the origin of the language necessarily implies some knowledge of the nations that, by successive contributions, have constituted it such as it is found in the final forms of its poetry and elegant prose. As a needful appendix, therefore, to the history of Spanish literature, a very brief account will be here given of the different occupants of the soil of the country, who, in a greater or less degree, have contributed to form the present character both of the Spanish people and of their language and culture.

The oldest of these, and the people who, since we can go back no farther, must be by us regarded as the original inhabitants of the Spanish Peninsula, were the Iberians. They appear, at the remotest period of which tradition affords us any notice, to have been spread over the whole territory, and to have given to its mountains, rivers, and cities most of the names they still bear,—a fierce race, whose power has never been entirely broken by any of the long line of invaders who, at different times, have occupied the rest of the country. Even at this moment, a body of their descendants, less affected than we should have supposed possible by intercourse with the various nations that have successively pressed their borders, is believed, with a good degree of probability, to be recognized under the name of Biscayans, inhabiting the mountains in the northwestern portion of modern Spain. But, whether this be true or not, the Biscayans, down to the present day, have been a singular and a separate race. They have a peculiar language, peculiar local institutions, and a literature which is carried back to a remoter antiquity than that of any other people now possessing, not the soil of the Spanish Peninsula merely, but of any part of Southern Europe. They are, in fact, a people who seem to have been left as a solitary race, hardly connected, even by those ties of language which outlive all others, with any race of men now in existence or on record; some of their present customs and popular fables claiming to have come down from an age, of which history and tradition give only doubtful intimations. The[p. 357] most probable conjecture yet proposed to explain what there is peculiar and remarkable about the Biscayans and their language is that which supposes them to be descended from those ancient and mysterious Iberians, whose language seems to have been, at one period, spread through the whole Peninsula, and to have left traces which are recognized even in the present Spanish.[395]

The first intruders upon the Iberians were the Celts, who, according to Doctor Percy’s theory, constituted the foremost wave of the successive emigrations that broke upon Europe from the overflowing multitudes of Asia. At what precise period the Celts reached Spain, or any other of the Western countries they overran, can no longer be determined. But the contest between the invaders of the soil and its possessors[p. 358] was, from the few intimations of it that have come down to us, long and bloody; and, as was generally the case in the early successful invasions of countries by wandering masses of the human race, portions of the ancient inhabitants were driven to the fastnesses of their mountains, and the remainder became gradually incorporated with the conquerors. The new people, thus formed of two races that, in antiquity, had the reputation of being warlike and powerful, was appropriately called the Celtiberian,[396] and constituted the body of the population which, broken into various tribes, but with similar manners and institutions, occupied the Peninsula when it first became known to the civilized nations of Europe. The language of the Celts, as might be expected, is represented in the present Spanish, as it is in the French and even in the Italian, though but slightly, of course, in any of them.[397]

Thus far, all access to Spain had been by land; for, in the earliest periods of the world’s history, no other mode of emigration or invasion was known. But the Phœnicians, the oldest commercial people of classical antiquity, soon afterwards found their way thither over the waters of the Mediterranean. At what time they arrived in Spain, or where they made their first establishment, is not known. A mystery hangs over this remarkable people, darker than belongs to the[p. 359] age in which they lived, and connected, no doubt, with the wary spirit in which they pursued their commercial adventures. Their position at home made colonization the obvious and almost the only means of commercial wealth among them, and Spain proved the most tempting of the countries to which their power could reach. Their chief Spanish colonies were near the Pillars of Hercules, in the neighbourhood of our present Cadiz, which they probably founded, and about the mouth and on the banks of the Guadalquivir. Their great object was the mines of precious metals with which ancient Spain abounded. For Spain, from the earliest notices of its history till the fall of the Roman Empire, was the El Dorado of the rest of the world, and furnished a large proportion of the materials for its circulating wealth.[398] During a long period, too, these mines seem to have been known only to the Phœnicians, who thus reserved to themselves the secret of a great power and influence over the nations near them, while, at the same time,—establishing colonies, as was their custom, to secure the sources of their wealth,—they carried their language and manners through a considerable part of the South of Spain, and even far round on the shores of the Atlantic.[399]

But the Phœnicians had still earlier founded a colony on the northern coast of Africa, which, under the name of Carthage, was destined to grow more powerful than the country that sent it forth. Its means were the same; for the Carthaginians became eminently a commercial people, and depended, in no small degree, upon the resources of their colonies.[p. 360] They trod closely and almost constantly in the footsteps of their mother country, and often supplanted her power. It was, in fact, through the Phœnician colonies that the Carthaginians entered Spain, whose tempting territory was divided from them only by the Mediterranean. But for a long period, though they maintained a large military force in Cadiz, and stretched their possessions boldly and successfully along the Spanish shores, they did not seem inclined to penetrate far into the interior, or to do more than occupy enough of the country to overawe its population and control its trade. When, however, the First Punic War had rendered Spain of more consequence to the Carthaginians than it had ever been before, they undertook its entire conquest and occupation. Under Hamilcar, the father of Hannibal, about two hundred and twenty-seven years before the Christian era, they spread themselves at once over nearly the whole country, as far as the Iberus, and, building Carthagena and some other strong places, seemed to have taken final possession of the Peninsula, on which the Romans had not yet set foot.

The Romans, however, were not slow to perceive the advantage their dangerous rivals had gained. By the first treaty of peace made between these great powers, it was stipulated, that the Carthaginians should advance no farther,—should neither molest Saguntum nor cross the Iberus. Hannibal violated these conditions, and the Second Punic War broke out, two hundred and eighteen years before the Christian era. The Scipios entered Spain in consequence of it; and at its conclusion, in the year B. C. 201, the Carthaginians had no longer any possessions in Europe, though, as descendants of the Phœnicians, they left in the population and language of Spain traces which have never been wholly obliterated.[400]

But,[401] though, by the Second Punic War, the Carthaginians[p. 361] were thus driven from the Spanish Peninsula, the Romans were far from having obtained unmolested or secure possession of it. The Carthaginians themselves, even when engaged in a commerce whose spirit was, on the whole, peaceful, had never ceased to be in contest with the warlike Celtiberian tribes of the interior; and the Romans were obliged to accept the inheritance of a warfare to which, in their character of intruders, they naturally succeeded. The Roman Senate, indeed, according to their usual policy, chose to regard Spain, from the end of the Second Punic War, both as conquered and as a province; and, in truth, they had really obtained permanent and quiet possession of a considerable part of it. But, from the time when the Roman armies first entered the Peninsula until they became masters of the whole of it,—except the mountains of the Northwest, which never yielded to their power,—two complete centuries elapsed, filled with bloodshed and crime. No province cost the Roman[p. 362] people a price so great. The struggle for Numantia, which lasted fourteen years, the wars against Viriates, and the war of Sertorius,—to say nothing of that between Pompey and Cæsar,—all show the formidable character of the protracted contest by which alone the Roman power could be confirmed in the Peninsula; so that, though Spain was the first portion of the continent out of Italy which the Romans began to occupy as a province, it was the very last of which their possession was peaceful and unquestioned.[402]

From the outset, however, there was a tendency to a union between the two races, wherever the conquerors were able to establish quietness and order; for the vast advantages of Roman civilization could be obtained only by the adoption of Roman manners and the Latin language. This union, from the great importance of the province, the Romans desired no less than the natives. Forty-seven years only after they entered Spain, a colony, consisting of a large body of the descendants from the mingled blood of Romans and natives, was established by a formal decree of the Senate, with privileges beyond the usual policy of their government.[403] A little later, colonies of all kinds were greatly multiplied; and it is impossible to read Cæsar and Livy without feeling that the Roman policy was more generous to Spain, than it was to any other of the countries that successively came within its control. Tarragona, where the Scipios first landed, Carthagena, founded by Asdrubal, and Córdova, always so important, early took the forms and character of the larger municipalities in Italy; and, in the time of Strabo, Cadiz, for numbers, wealth, and activity, was second only to Rome itself.[404] Long, there[p. 363]fore, before Agrippa had broken the power of the mountaineers at the North, the whole South, with its rich and luxuriant valleys, had become like another Italy; a fact, of which the descriptions in the third book of Pliny’s Natural History can leave no reasonable doubt. To this, however, we should add the remarkable circumstance, that the Emperor Vespasian, soon after the pacification of the North, found it for his interest to extend to the whole of Spain the privileges of the municipalities in Latium.[405]

Spaniards, too, earlier than any other strangers, obtained those distinctions of which the Romans themselves were so ambitious, and which they so reluctantly granted to any but native citizens. The first foreigner that ever rose to the consulship was Balbus, from Cadiz, and he, too, was the first foreigner that ever gained the honors of a public triumph. The first foreigner that ever sat on the throne of the world was Trajan, a native of Italica, near Seville;[406] and indeed, if we examine the history of Rome from the time of Hannibal to the fall of the Western Empire, we shall probably find that no part of the world, beyond the limits of Italy, contributed so much to the resources, wealth, and power of the capital, as Spain, and that no province received, in return, so large a share of the honors and dignities of the Roman government.

On all accounts, therefore, the connection between Rome and Spain was intimate, and the civilization and refinement of the province took their character early from those of the capital. Sertorius found it a wise policy to cause the children of the principal native families to be taught Latin and Greek, and to become accomplished in the literature and elegant knowledge to be found in those admirable languages;[407] and when, ten years later, Metellus, in his turn, had crushed the power of Sertorius, and came home triumphant to Rome, he brought with him a number of native Cordovan poets, against[p. 364] whose Latinity the fastidious ear of Cicero was able to object only that their accent had pingue quiddam ... atque peregrinum,—something thick, or rude, and foreign.[408]

From this period Latin writers began to be constantly produced in Spain.[409] Portius Latro, a native of Córdova, but a public advocate of the highest reputation at Rome, opened in the metropolis the earliest of those schools for Roman rhetoric, that afterwards became so numerous and so famous, and, among other distinguished men, numbered as his disciples Octavius Cæsar, Mæcenas, Marcus Agrippa, and Ovid. The two Senecas were Spaniards, and so was Lucan; names celebrated enough, certainly, to have conferred lasting glory on any city within the limits of the Empire. Martial came from Bilbilis, and, in his old age, retired there again to die in peace, amidst the scenes which, during his whole life, seem to have been dear to him. Columella, too, the best of the Roman writers on agriculture, was a Spaniard; and so, it is probable, were Quinctilian and Silius Italicus. Many others might be added, whose rights and reputation were fully acknowledged in the capital of the world, during the last days of the Republic, or the best days of the Empire, as orators, poets, and historians; but their works, though famous in their own time, have perished in the general wreck of the larger part of ancient literature. The great lights, however, of Roman letters in Spain are familiar to all, and are at once recognized as constituting an important portion of the body of the Latin classics, and an essential part of the glory of Roman civilization.[410]

[p. 365]After this period, no considerable change, that needs to be noticed, took place in the Spanish Peninsula, until the final overthrow of the Roman power.[411] Undoubtedly, at the Northwest, and especially among the mountains and valleys of what is now called Biscay, the language and institutions of Rome were never established;[412] but, in all the remainder of the country, whatever there was of public policy or intellectual refinement rested on the basis of the Roman character and of Roman civilization. But the Roman character and civilization decayed there, as they did everywhere, and though, during the last four centuries in which the Imperial authority was acknowledged in Spain, the country enjoyed more of tranquillity than was enjoyed in any other province within the limits of the Empire, still, like the others, it was much disturbed during the whole of this fatal period, and was gradually yielding to the common destiny.

It was during this troubled interval, that another great cause of change was introduced into Spain, and began to produce its wide effects on whatever of intellectual culture existed in the country. This great cause was Christianity. The precise point of time, or the precise mode, of its first appearance in Spain cannot now be determined. But it was certainly taught there in the second century, and seems to have come in, through the southern coast, from Africa.[413] At first, as elsewhere, it was persecuted, and therefore professed[p. 366] in secret; but, as early as the year 300, churches had been publicly established, and from the time of Constantine and Osius of Córdova, it was the acknowledged and prevalent religion of large parts of the country. What is of consequence to us is, that the language of Christianity in Spain was the Latin. Its instructions were obviously given in Latin, and its early literature, so far as it appeared in Spain, is found wholly in that language.[414] This is very important, not only because it proves the great diffusion of the Latin language there from the third century to the eighth, but because it shows that no other language was left strong enough to contend with it, at least through the middle and southern portions of the country.

The Christian clergy, however, it must be recollected, did little or nothing to preserve the purity of the Latin language in Spain, or to maintain whatever of an intellectual tone they found in the institutions established by the Romans.[415] How[p. 367] early these institutions, and especially the ancient schools, decayed there, we do not know; but it was earlier than in some other parts of the Empire. In the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries even the ecclesiastics were sunk into the grossest ignorance, so that, when Gregory the Great, who was Pope from 590 to 604, warned Licinian, Bishop of Carthagena, not to give consecration to persons without education, Licinian replied, that, unless it were permitted to consecrate those who knew only that Christ had been crucified, none could be found to fill the priestly office.[416] In fact, Isidore of Seville, the famous Archbishop and saint, who died in 636, is the last of the Spanish ecclesiastics that attempted to write Latin with purity; and even he thought so ill of classical antiquity, that he prohibited the monks under his control from reading books written by heathen of the olden time;[417] thus taking away the only means of preserving from its threatened corruption the language they wrote and spoke.[418] Of course this corruption advanced, in times of confusion and national trouble, at a rapid pace, until the spoken language of the country be[p. 368]came, to those out of it, an almost unintelligible jargon; and the offices of the Church, as they were read at mass and on feast days, could no longer be understood by the body of the worshippers. This was the result, partly of the decay of all the Roman institutions, and, indeed, of all the principles on which those institutions had rested, and partly of the invasion and conquest of the country by the Northern barbarians, whose irruption, with the violences that followed it, left for a long time neither the quietness nor the sense of security necessary even to the humblest intellectual culture.[419]

This great irruption of the Northern barbarians effected another and most important revolution in the language of the Peninsula. It in fact gave to it a new character. For the race of men by whom it was made was entirely different, both in its origin, its language, and, indeed, in all that goes to make up national character, from the four races that had previously occupied the country. The new invaders belonged to those vast multitudes beyond the Rhine, who had been much known to the Romans from the time of Julius Cæsar, and who, at the period of which we speak, had been, for above a century, leaning with a portentous weight upon the failing barriers, which, on the banks of that glorious stream, had long marked the limits of Roman power. Urged forward, not only by the natural disposition of Northern nations to come into a milder climate, and of barbarous nations to obtain the spoils of civilization, but by uneasy movements among the Tartars of Upper Asia, which were communicated through the Sclavonic tribes to those of Germany, their accumulated masses burst, in the beginning of the fifth century, with an irresistible impulse, on the wide and ill-defended borders of the Empire. Without noticing the tumultuous attempts that preceded this final and fatal invasion and were either defeated or turned aside, it is enough to say, that the first hordes of the irruption which succeeded in overthrowing the empire of the world began to pass the Rhine at the end of the year 406, and in the[p. 369] beginning of 407. These hordes, however, were pressed forward, it may be said almost without a figure, by the merely physical weight of the large bodies that followed them. Tribe succeeded tribe, with all the facility and haste of a nomadic life, which knows neither local attachments nor local interests, and with all the eagerness and violence of barbarians seeking the grosser luxuries of civilization; so that when, at the end of that century, the last of the greater warlike emigrations had forced for itself a place within the limits of the Roman empire, it may be truly said, that, from the Rhine and the British Channel on the one side, to Calabria and Gibraltar on the other, there was hardly a spot of that empire over which they had not passed, and few where they were not then to be found possessors of the soil, and masters of the political and military power.[420]

In the particular character of the multitudes that finally established themselves within its territory, Spain was certainly less unfortunate than were most of the countries of Europe, that were in a similar manner invaded. The first tribes that rushed over the Pyrenees—the Franks, who came before the general invasion, and the Vandali, the Alani, and the Suevi, who, as far as Spain was concerned, formed its vanguard—committed, no doubt, atrocious excesses, and produced a state of cruel suffering, which is eloquently and indignantly described in a well-known passage of Mariana;[421] but, after a comparatively short period, these tribes or nations passed over into Africa and never returned. The Goths, who succeeded them as invaders, were, it is true, barbarians, like their predecessors, but they were barbarians of a milder and more generous type. They had already been in Italy, where they had become somewhat acquainted with the Roman laws, manners, and language; and when, in 411, they traversed the South of France and entered the Peninsula, they were received rather as friends than as conquerors.[422] Indeed, at first, their authority was exercised in the name and on behalf of the Empire; but, before the century was ended, the last Emperor of the West had[p. 370] ceased to reign; and, by a sort of inevitable necessity, the Visigoth dynasty was established throughout nearly the whole of Spain, and acknowledged by Odoacer, the earliest of the barbarian kings of Italy.

Previously, however, to the entrance of the Visigoths into Spain, they had been converted to Christianity by the venerable Ulfilas; and, as early as 466-484, in a period of great confusion, they had formed for themselves a criminal code of laws, to which, in 506, they added a civil code,—the two being subsequently made to constitute the basis of that important body of laws which, above a century later, was compiled by the fourth Council of Toledo.[423] But, though the Visigoths had thus adopted some of the most important means of civilization, their language, like that of the rest of the Northern invaders, remained essentially barbarous. It was never, at any time, in Spain, a written language. It was of the Teutonic stock, and had nothing, or almost nothing, in common with the Latin. Still, the people who spoke it were so intimately mingled with the conquered people, and each, from its position, had become so dependent on the other, that it was no longer a question whether they should find some medium of communication suited to the daily and hourly intercourse of common life. They were, in fact, compelled to do so. The same consequences, therefore, followed, that followed in the other Roman or Romanized countries which were invaded in the same way. A union of the two languages took place; but not a union on equal terms. This was impossible. For on the side of the Latin were not only the existing, though decayed, institutions of the country, but whatever of civilization and refinement was still to be found in the world, as well as the vast and growing power of the Christian religion, with its organized priesthood, which refused to be heard in any other language. So that, if the Goths, on their part, had the political and military authority, and even a more fresh and vigorous intellectual character, they were obliged, on the whole, to submit to such prevalent influences, and to adopt, in a great[p. 371] degree, the language through which alone they could obtain the benefits of a more advanced state of society. The Latin, therefore, corrupted and degraded as it was, remained in Spain, as it did in the other countries where similar races of men came together, by far the most prominent element in the language that grew out of their union, and was thus made to constitute the grand basis of the modern Spanish.

The most considerable change effected by the invaders in the language they found established in Spain was a change in its grammatical structure. The Goths, like any uncivilized people, could learn the individual words of the more cultivated language they every day heard, easier than they could comprehend the philosophical spirit of its grammar. While, therefore, they freely adopted the large and convenient vocabulary of the Latin, they compelled its complicated forms and constructions to yield to the simpler constructions and habits of their own native dialects. This may be illustrated by the striking changes they wrought in the established inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. The Romans, it is well known, had strict declensions to mark the relations of their nouns, and strict conjugations by which they distinguished the times of their verbs. The Goths had neither, but used articles united with prepositions to mark the cases of their nouns, and auxiliaries of different kinds to mark the changes in the meanings of their verbs.[424]

When, therefore, in Spain, they received the Latin, where no article existed, they compelled ille, as the nearest word they could find, to serve for their definite article, and unus for their indefinite,—so that, in their oldest deeds and other documents, we find such phrases as ille homo, the man; unus homo, a man; illa mulier, the woman; and so on,—from[p. 372] which the modern Spanish derives its articles el and la, uno, una, etc., just as the French, by a similar process, obtained the articles le and la, un and une, and the Italians il and la, uno and una.[425] The same sort of compromise took place in relation to the verbs. Instead of vici, I have conquered, they said habeo victus; instead of saying amor, I am loved, they said sum amatus; and from such a use of habere and esse, they introduced into the modern Spanish the auxiliaries haber and ser, as the Italians introduced avere and essere, and the French avoir and être.[426] This example of the effect produced by the Goths on the nouns and verbs of the Latin is but a specimen of the changes they brought about in the general structure of that language, by which they contributed their full share towards still further corrupting it, as well as towards modelling it into the present Spanish;—a great revolution, which it required above seven centuries fairly to accomplish, and two or three centuries more entirely to carry out into all its final results.[427]

But, in the mean time, another tremendous invasion had burst upon Spain; violent, unforeseen, and for a time threatening to sweep away all the civilization and refinement, that had been preserved from the old institutions of the country, or were springing up under the new. This was the remarkable invasion of the Arabs, which compels us now to seek some of the materials of the Spanish character, language, and[p. 373] literature in the heart of Asia, as we have already been obliged to seek for some of them in the extreme North of Europe.

The Arabs, who, at every period of their history, have been a picturesque and extraordinary people, received, from the passionate religion given to them by the genius and fanaticism of Mohammed, an impulse that, in most respects, is unparalleled. As late as the year of Christ 623, the fortunes and the fate of the Prophet were still uncertain, even within the narrow limits of his own wild and wandering tribe; yet, in less than a century from that time, not only Persia, Syria, and nearly the whole of Western Asia, but Egypt and all the North of Africa had yielded to the power of his military faith. A success so wide and so rapid, founded on religious enthusiasm, and so speedily followed by the refinements of civilization, is unlike any thing else in the history of the world.[428]

When the Arabs had obtained a tolerably quiet possession of the cities and coasts of Africa, it was natural they should turn next to Spain, from which they were separated only by the straits of the Mediterranean. Their descent was made, in great force, near Gibraltar, in 711; the battle of the Guadalete, as it is called by the Moorish writers, and of Xerez, as it is called by the Christians, followed immediately; and, in the course of three years, they had, with their accustomed celerity, conquered the whole of Spain, except the fated region of the Northwest, behind whose mountains a large body of Christians, under Pelayo, retreated, leaving the rest of their country in the hands of the conquerors.

But while the Christians, who had escaped from the wreck of the Gothic power, were thus either shut up in the mountains of Biscay and Asturias, or engaged in that desperate struggle of nearly eight centuries, which ended in the final expulsion of their invaders, the Moors[429] throughout the centre and especially throughout the South of Spain were enjoying[p. 374] an empire as splendid and intellectual as the elements of their religion and civilization would permit.

Much has been said concerning the glory of this empire, and the effect it has produced on the literature and manners of modern times. Long ago, a disposition was shown by Huet and Massieu to trace to them the origin both of rhyme and of romantic fiction; but both are now generally admitted to have been, as it were, spontaneous productions of the human mind, which different nations at different periods have invented separately for themselves.[430] Somewhat later, Father Andres, a learned Spaniard, who wrote in Italy and in Italian, anxious to give to his own country the honor of imparting to the rest of Europe the first impulse to refinement after the fall of the Roman empire, conceived the theory, at once broader and more definite than that of Huet, that the poetry and cultivation of the Troubadours of Provence, which are generally admitted to be the oldest of Southern Europe in modern times, were derived entirely and immediately from the Arabs of Spain; a theory which has been adopted by Ginguené, by Sismondi, and by the authors of the “Literary History of France.”[431] But they all go upon the presumption that rhyme and metrical composition, as well as a poetic spirit, were awakened later in Provence than subsequent inquiries show them to have been. For Father Andres and his followers date the communication of the Arabian influences of Spain upon the South of France from the cap[p. 375]ture of Toledo in 1085, when, no doubt, there was a great increase of intercourse between the two countries.[432] But Raynouard[433] has since published the fragment of a poem, the manuscript of which can hardly be dated so late as the year 1000, and has thus shown that the Provençal literature is to be carried back above a century earlier, and traced to the period of the gradual corruption of the Latin, and the gradual formation of the modern language. The elder Schlegel, too, has entered into the discussion of the theory itself, and left little reason to doubt that Raynouard’s positions on the subject are well founded.[434]

But, though we cannot, with Father Andres and his followers, trace the poetry and refinement of all the South of Europe in modern times primarily or mainly to the Arabs of Spain, we must still, so far as the Spanish language and literature are concerned, trace something to them. For their progress in refinement was hardly less brilliant and rapid than their progress in empire. The reigns of the two Abderrahmans, and the period of the glory of Córdova, which began about 750 and continued almost to the time of its conquest by the Christians in 1236, were more intellectual than could then be found elsewhere; and if the kingdom of Granada, which ended in 1492, was less refined, it was, perhaps, even more splendid and luxurious.[435] The public schools and libraries of the Spanish Arabs were resorted to, not only by those of their own faith at home and in the East, but by Christians from different parts of Europe; and Pope Sylvester the Sec[p. 376]ond, one of the most remarkable men of his age, is believed to have owed his elevation to the pontificate to the culture he received in Seville and Córdova.[436]

In the midst of this flourishing empire lived large masses of native Christians, who had not retreated with their hardy brethren under Pelayo to the mountains of the Northwest, but dwelt among their conquerors, protected by the wide toleration which the Mohammedan religion originally prescribed and practised. Indeed, except that, as a vanquished people, they paid double the tribute paid by Moors, and that they were taxed for their Church property, these Christians were little burdened or restrained, and were even permitted to have their bishops, churches, and monasteries, and to be judged by their own laws and their own tribunals, whenever the question at issue was one that related only to themselves, unless it involved a capital punishment.[437] But, though they were thus to a certain degree preserved as a separate people, and though, considering their peculiar position, they maintained, more than would be readily believed, their religious loyalty, still the[p. 377] influence of a powerful and splendid empire, and of a population every way more prosperous and refined than themselves, was constantly pressing upon them. The inevitable result was, that, in the course of ages, they gradually yielded something of their national character. They came, at last, to wear the Moorish dress; they adopted Moorish manners; and they served in the Moorish armies and in the places of honor at the courts of Córdova and Granada. In all respects, indeed, they deserved the name given to them, that of Mozárabes or Muçárabes, persons who seemed to become Arabs in manners and language; for they were so mingled with their conquerors and masters, that, in process of time, they could be distinguished from the Arabs amidst whom they lived by little except their faith.[438]

The effect of all this on whatever of the language and literature of Rome still survived among them was, of course, early apparent. The natives of the soil who dwelt among the Moors soon neglected their degraded Latin, and spoke Arabic. In 794, the conquerors thought they might already venture to provide schools for teaching their own language to their Chris[p. 378]tian subjects, and require them to use no other.[439] Alvarus Cordubensis, who wrote his “Indiculus Luminosus” in 854,[440] and who is a competent witness on such a subject, shows that they had succeeded; for he complains that, in his time, the Christians neglected their Latin, and acquired Arabic to such an extent that hardly one Christian in a thousand was to be found who could write a Latin letter to a brother in the faith, while many were able to write Arabic poetry so as to rival the Moors themselves.[441] Such, indeed, was the early prevalence of the Arabic, that John, Bishop of Seville, one of those venerable men who commanded the respect alike of Christians and Mohammedans, found it necessary to translate the Scriptures into it, because his flock could read them in no other language.[442] Even the records of Christian churches were often kept in Arabic from this period down through several succeeding centuries, and in the archives of the cathedral at Toledo, above two thousand documents were recently and are probably still to be seen, written chiefly by Christians and ecclesiastics, in Arabic.[443]

Nor was this state of things at once changed when the[p. 379] Christians from the North prevailed again; for, after the reconquest of some of the central portions of the country, the coins struck by Christian kings to circulate among their Christian subjects were covered with Arabic inscriptions, as may be seen in coins of Alfonso the Sixth and Alfonso the Eighth, in the years 1185, 1186, 1191, 1192, 1199, and 1212.[444] And in 1256 Alfonso the Wise, when, by a solemn decree dated at Burgos, 18th December, he was making provision for education at Seville, established Arabic schools there, as well as Latin.[445] Indeed, still later, and even down to the fourteenth century, the public acts and monuments of that part of Spain were often written in Arabic, and the signatures to important ecclesiastical documents, though the body of the instrument might be in Latin or Spanish, were sometimes made in the Arabic character, as they are in a grant of privileges by Ferdinand the Fourth to the monks of Saint Clement.[446] So that almost as late as the period of the conquest of Granada, and in some respects later, it is plain that the language, manners, and civilization of the Arabs were still much diffused among the Christian population of the centre and South of Spain.

When, therefore, the Christians from the North, after a contest the most bitter and protracted, had rescued the greater part of their country from thraldom, and driven the Moors before them into its southwestern provinces, they found themselves, as they advanced, surrounded by large masses of their ancient countrymen, Christians, indeed, in faith and feeling, though most imperfect in Christian knowledge and morals, but Moors in dress, manners, and language. A union, of course, took place between these different bodies, who, by the fortunes of war, had been separated from each other so long, that, though originally of the same stock and still connected by some of the strongest sympathies of our nature, they had for centuries ceased to possess a common language in which[p. 380] alone it would be possible to carry on the daily intercourse of life. But such a reunion of the two parts of the nation, wherever and whenever it occurred, necessarily implied an immediate modification or accommodation of the language that was to be used by both. No doubt, such a modification of the Gothicized and corrupted Latin had been going on, in some degree, from the time of the Moorish conquest. But now it was indispensable that it should be completed. A considerable infusion of the Arabic, therefore, quickly took place;[447] and the last important element was thus added to the present Spanish, which has been polished and refined, indeed, by subsequent centuries of progress in knowledge and civilization, but is still, in its prominent features, the same that it appeared soon after what, with characteristic nationality, is called the Restoration of Spain.[448]

The language, however, which was thus brought from the North by the Christian conquerors, and became modified as it advanced among the Moorish population of the South, was, as we have seen, by no means the classical Latin. It was Latin corrupted, at first, by the causes which had corrupted that language throughout the Roman empire, even before the overthrow of the Roman power,—then by the inevitable effect of the establishment in Spain of the Goths and other barbarians immediately afterwards,—and subsequently by additions from the original Iberian or Basque, made during the residence of the Christians, after the Moorish conquest, among the mountaineers, with whom that language had never ceased to prevail. But the principal cause of the final degradation of the Latin at the North, after the middle of the eighth century, was, no doubt, the miserable condition of the people[p. 381] who spoke it. They had fled from the ruins of the Latinized kingdom of the Goths, pursued by the fiery sword of the Moslem, and found themselves crowded together in the wild fastnesses of the Biscayan and Asturian mountains. There, deprived of the social institutions in which they had been nurtured, and which, however impaired or ruined, yet represented and retained to the last whatever of civilization had been left in their unhappy country; mingled with a people who, down to that time, appear to have shaken off little of the barbarism that had resisted alike the invasion of the Romans and of the Goths; and pent up, in great numbers, within a territory too small, too rude, and too poor to afford them the means of a tolerable subsistence, the Christians at the North seem to have sunk at once into a state nearly approaching that of savage life,—a state, of course, in which no care or thought would be given to preserve the purity of the language they spoke.[449] Nor was their condition much more favorable for such purposes when, with the vigor of despair, they began to recover the country they had lost. For they were then constantly in arms and constantly amidst the perils and sufferings of an exhausting warfare, embittered and exasperated by intense national and religious hatreds. When, therefore, as they advanced with their conquests towards the south and the east, they found themselves coming successively in contact with those portions of their race that had remained among the Moors, they felt that they were at once in the presence of a civilization and refinement altogether superior to their own.

The result was inevitable. The change, which, as has been said, now took place in their language, was governed by this peculiar circumstance in their position. For, as the Goths, between the fifth and eighth centuries, received a vast number of words from the Latin because it was the language of a[p. 382] people with whom they were intimately mingled and who were much more intellectual and advanced than themselves, so now, for the same reason, the whole nation received, between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, another increase of their vocabulary from the Arabic, and accommodated themselves, in a remarkable degree, to the advanced cultivation of their Southern countrymen and of their new Moorish subjects.

At what precise period the language, since called the Spanish and Castilian, can be said to have been formed by this union of the Gothicized and corrupted Latin that came from the North with the Arabic of the South, cannot now be determined.[450] Such a union was, from its nature, brought about by one of those gradual and silent changes in what belongs essentially to the character of a whole people, which can leave behind them no formal monuments or exact records. But the learned Marina, who may perhaps be safely trusted on this point, asserts that no document in the Castilian language, with a date anterior to the year 1140, exists, or, in his opinion, ever did exist.[451] Indeed the oldest yet cited is a confirmation of privileges by Alfonso the Seventh, in the year 1155, to the city of Avilés in Asturias.[452] However gradual,[p. 383] therefore, and indistinct may have been the formation and first appearance of the Castilian as the spoken language of modern[p. 384] Spain, we may no doubt feel sure, that, about the middle of the twelfth century, it had risen to the dignity of being a written language, and had begun to appear in the important public documents of the time.

From this period, then, we are to recognize the existence in Spain of a language spreading gradually through the greater part of the country, different from the pure or the corrupted Latin, and still more different from the Arabic, yet obviously formed by a union of both, modified by the analogies and spirit of the Gothic constructions and dialects, and containing some remains of the vocabularies of the Germanic tribes, of the Iberians, the Celts, and the Phœnicians, who, at different periods, had occupied nearly or quite the whole of the Peninsula. This language was called originally the Romance, because it was so much formed out of the language of the Romans; just as the Christians, in the northwestern mountains, were called by the Arabs Alromi, because they were imagined to be descended from the Romans.[453] Later, it was called Spanish, from the name taken by the whole people, and perhaps, at last, it was even more frequently called Castilian, from that portion of the country, whose political power grew to be so predominant, as to give its dialect a preponderance over all the other dialects, which, like the Galician, the Catalonian,[p. 385] and the Valencian, were, for a longer or shorter period, written languages, each with claims to a literature of its own.

The proportion of materials contributed by each of the languages that enter into the composition of the Spanish has never been accurately settled, though enough is known to permit an adjustment of their general relations to each other. Sarmiento, who investigated the subject with some care, thinks that six tenths of the present Castilian are of Latin origin; one tenth Greek and ecclesiastical; one tenth Northern; one tenth Arabic; and the remaining tenth East Indian and American, Gypsy, modern German, French, and Italian. Probably this estimate is not very far from the truth. But Larramendi and Humboldt leave no doubt that the Basque should be added; and, while Marina’s inquiries give a smaller proportion to the Arabic, those of Gayangos raise it to an eighth. The main point, however, is one concerning which there can be no doubt;—the broad foundations of the Castilian are to be sought in the Latin, to which, in fact, we are to trace nearly or quite all the contributions sometimes attributed to the Greek.[454]

[p. 386]

The Spanish, or Castilian, language thus formed was introduced into general use sooner and more easily than, perhaps, any other of the newly created languages, which, as the confusion of the Middle Ages passed off, were springing up, throughout the South of Europe, to take the place of the universal language of the Roman world. The reasons of this were, that the necessity for its creation and employment was more urgent, from the extraordinary relations between the Moors, the Muçárabes, and the Christians; that the reign of Saint Ferdinand, at least as late as the capture of Seville in 1247, was a period, if not of quiet, yet of prosperity and almost of splendor; and that the Latin, both as a written and a spoken language, had become so much degraded, that it could offer less resistance to change in Spain than in the other countries where a similar revolution was in progress.[455] We must not be surprised, therefore, to find, not only specimens, but even considerable monuments, of Spanish literature soon after the first recognized appearance of the language itself. The narrative poem of the Cid, for instance, cannot be dated later than the year 1200; and Berceo, who flourished from 1220 to 1240, though he almost apologizes for not writing in Latin,[456][p. 387] and thus shows how certainly he lived in the debatable period between the two languages, has left us a large mass of genuine Spanish, or Castilian, verse. But it is a little later, and in the reign of Alfonso the Tenth, from 1252 to 1282, that we are to consider the introduction of the Spanish, as a written, a settled, and a polite language, to have been recognized and completed. By his order, the Bible was translated into it from the Vulgate; he required all contracts and legal instruments to be written in it, and all law proceedings to be held in it; and, finally, by his own remarkable code, “Las Siete Partidas,” he at once laid the foundations for the extension and establishment of its authority as far as the Spanish race and power should prevail.[457] From this period, therefore, we are to look for the history and development of the Spanish language, in the body of Spanish literature.

As the earliest ballads were not by known authors, but were gathered at different times, from the traditions of the people, it is impossible to understand their history without understanding something of the history of the Ballad-books in which they are found. A sketch of such a history has been written, with much knowledge of the subject, by Ferdinand Wolf, and is found in the “Jahrbücher der Literatur” (Band CXIV., Wien, 1846, pp. 1-72). I do not willingly enter into a discussion so peculiarly within the province of this distinguished scholar; but, as I possess, or have seen, several very early Ballad-books which he does not mention, and am besides unable to agree with him as to which is the oldest of them all, and therefore the most important, I will, as briefly as I can, give my views of this obscure branch of bibliography; confining myself, where it is possible to do so, to what has not before been published, and touching the whole matter only so far as it concerns the history of Spanish poetry.

A considerable number of ballads, printed on one or more sheets, in black letter, for popular use, may still be found. Such are “El Conde Alarcos”; “El Moro Calaynos”; a collection of twelve separate pieces, and a collection of fifty-nine, sold at Heber’s sale; with others noticed by Brunet, under the head of Romances Séparées, in his article “Romanceros[p. 389].” But they are all without dates; it is extremely uncertain when any one of them was printed; and it seems to me, judging from those I have seen, to be more probable, that they were taken from collections now known to exist or to have existed, than that they helped to make up those collections,—the oldest of which claims to have been taken from the memories of the people, and from imperfect manuscript copies circulating only for popular use.

1. The first separate collection of ballads ever published was, I think, the one printed at Saragossa, under the title of “Silva de Varios Romances,” by Stevan G. de Nagera, in two parts, 1550. (See Brunet, Manuel du Libraire, ed. 1843, art. Silva.) I have seen a copy of this Silva belonging, in 1838, to M. Henri Ternaux-Compans, of Paris. In a prefatory address to the First Part, the collector says, “I have taken the trouble in this Silva to bring together all the ballads that have come to my knowledge”; adding afterwards, “It may be that some, though very few, of the old ballads are wanting, which I have not inserted, either because they did not come to my knowledge, or because I did not find them so complete and perfect as I wished. Nor do I deny, that, in some of those here printed, there may be an occasional error; but this is to be imputed to the copies from which I took them, which were very corrupt, and to the weakness of memory of some persons, who dictated them to me, and who could not recollect them perfectly. I did all I could to obtain the least faulty that were to be had, and had no little trouble to collect and amend them, and add to some that were imperfect. However, I wished they should stand in some order, and so I placed, first, those of devotion and from the Holy Scriptures; next, those that relate Castilian stories; next, those of Troy; and, lastly, those that relate to affairs of love.” After these ballads, which fill one hundred and ninety-six leaves, he gives us twenty-five leaves of canciones, villancicos, and chistes, or jests, among which, at folio 199, is the well-known witty Dialogue of Castillejo and his Pen. At the end of the First Part, folio 221, we have the following Address to the Reader, in which the collector has evidently changed his mind about having obtained all[p. 390] but a “very few of the old ballads” known to exist; for he now says: “Some of my friends, as they knew I was printing this ‘Cancionero,’ brought me many ballads, in order that I might insert them; but as we were coming to the end of the printing, I chose not to put them in, since they would interrupt the order that had been begun; but rather to make another volume, which will be the Second Part of this ‘Silva de Varios Romances,’ which is now in the press. Vale.”

This “Segunda Parte” was published in the same year, 1550, and consists of two hundred and three leaves of ballads, nineteen leaves of chistes, and two leaves of contents, at the end of which the “Impresor” says: “I did not wish to put into this part any more of those short chistes, because, if God pleases, they will be put into the Third Part, with other things agreeable to the curious reader. Vale.” I know of no copy of this Third Part; but it is possible it was printed, because, in the “Silva de Varios Romances,” of which Wolf and Brunet mention several editions between 1578 and 1673, and of which I possess that of 1602, the title-page declares that it contains “los mejores romances de los tres libros de la Silva.”

2. The first two parts, however, combined into one, but omitting the chistes, etc., soon appeared at Antwerp, printed by Martin Nucio, a well-known publisher, with considerable additions, but without the date of its publication. The Preface is in nearly the same words with that of the Silva of Nagera, Parte I.; but, when it announces the arrangement of the ballads, it changes their order, and puts “first, those that speak of France and the Twelve Peers; then, those that relate Castilian stories; then, those of Troy; and, lastly, those that treat of affairs of love.” Some of the ballads of the Saragossa collection are omitted, and the whole is called “Cancionero de Romances.” There is a copy of it in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsénal at Paris; and that it is subsequent to the Saragossa Silva, and taken from it, seems certain, because one must be taken from the other, and the note at the end of the Silva, Parte I., shows that the Saragossa Silva was collected and printed at different times; while the arrangement of the ballads in the Cancionero of Antwerp shows that they were[p. 391] necessarily all present to the editor when he put his work together. Besides, how should Nucio collect ballads from the memories of the people around him at Antwerp, where there were few Spaniards, except soldiers? And how much less valuable would be any collection made there than one made in Spain?

3. Again, a “Cancionero de Romances” occurs, printed “En Envers en casa de Martin Nucio, MDL.,” a copy of which is in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal of Paris. It has the same Preface with the one last mentioned, from which it differs only in omitting seven of its ballads, and inserting thirty-seven others. The errors noted in the one without date, at folios 272. b, etc., are corrected in this one, dated 1550, and prove it to be the subsequent edition of the two,—a fact necessarily inferred, also, from the additions it contains.

4. This edition of 1550 seems to have been issued with different title-pages, for Wolf says there is a copy of it in the Imperial Library at Vienna, dated 1554. But nearly all the copies now known to exist bear the date of 1555, under which this collection is best known, and is commonly cited. It is absolutely the same work with the copy at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, dated 1550, ballad for ballad, and page for page; and as there is no appearance that the title-page of the copy at the Arsenal has been tampered with, we are to suppose that three editions of the collection of ballads made at Saragossa in 1550 appeared in the course of that year; two of which were published by Martin Nucio, at Antwerp. That all three are only one work is apparent from the circumstance, that their ballads are generally the same, and that they have the same Preface, a little changed in the second and third editions to meet the changes in the ballads contained in them. They are all in 18mo. The first, taking both its parts together, fills four hundred and thirty-six leaves; the second, two hundred and seventy-six; and the third, three hundred. Several reprints of the last are given by Wolf; namely, Antwerp, 1568 and 1573; Lisbon, 1581; and Barcelona, 1587 and 1626.

Subsequent to the Silva of Saragossa, we have several collections of ballads, that are noticed in the text,—such[p. 392] as those of Sepulveda, 1551, Timoneda, 1573, Linares, 1573, Padilla, 1583, Maldonado, 1586, and Cueva, 1587,—consisting chiefly or entirely of ballads written by their respective authors. At last, an attempt was made to gather another Romancero from all the sources, whether of books, memory, or tradition, that were open to its collectors,—the true principle on which the popular Spanish Romanceros have always been compiled. It seems to have been begun at Valencia, when the first volume of the “Flor de Varios y Nuevos Romances, Primera y Segunda Parte,” collected by Andrés de Villalta, with a Third Part by Felipe Mey,—himself a poet and scholar as well as a printer,[458]—were printed in one volume, in 1593, though each of them had, probably, been printed earlier by itself. It is cited by Duran (Romances Caballarescos, Madrid, 1832, 12mo, Tom. I., Advertencia); and from the ballads he took out of it there can be no doubt, that its three parts differed little from the first three parts of the “Romancero General” printed somewhat later. The second volume of this collection, which is entitled “Quarta y Quinta Parte de Flor de Romances,” was collected by Sebastian Velez de Guevara, Racionero de la Colegial de Santander, and was printed at Burgos, in 1594, 18mo, one hundred and ninety-one leaves. It is apparently not the first edition, for the Aprobacion by Pedro de Padilla, and a permission to print it, are dated 1592, while the permission to print the present edition is dated August 11, 1594, and says it has been “otras veces impreso.” Probably the two parts were originally printed separately.

The third volume, and the most important, is entitled “Sexta Parte de Flor de Romances Nuevos, recopilados de muchos Autores, por Pedro de Flores, Librero,” and was printed at Toledo, in 1594, 18mo, one hundred and ninety leaves. It is the first edition, but the license seems to speak of a fourth and fifth part as if also made by Flores. In a ballad prefixed to[p. 393] this third volume, Flores is accused before Apollo of having taken great pains to collect its contents.

to which, in a defence immediately following, Flores replies, that “they were stray ballads [romances que andavan descarriados], which he had brought together with great labor,” and for which the god proceeds to reward rather than to punish him. Flores adds, that he gives each ballad complete, and not like the street-singers, who drawl out one half, and then say they are tired of it. The whole account shows that many of the ballads in this Sixth Part—which is excellent and contains a hundred and fifty-eight—were collected from the memories of the people by Pedro Flores himself.

The fourth volume contains “Septima y Octava Parte de Flor de Varios Romances Nuevos, recopilados de muchos Autores”; printed by Juan Iñiguez de Lequerica, Alcalá de Henares, 1597, 18mo. There is a license for each part; that of the first dated May 4, 1596, and recognizing it as a reprint, and that of the second dated September 30, 1597, as if it were the original edition, and entitling it “Flores del Parnaso, Octava Parte.” The Seventh Part fills one hundred and sixty-eight leaves, and the Eighth one hundred and thirty-two leaves, numbered separately.

The fifth and last volume is called “Flor de Varios Romances diferentes de todos impresos, Novena Parte,” printed by Juan Flamenco, Madrid, 1597, 18mo, one hundred and forty-four leaves. The Aprobacion, 4th September, 1597, and the Tassa, 22d March, 1596, speak of it as the eighth and ninth parts; but the license, without date, is only for Part Ninth.

5. From these nine parts was made, with slight changes and additions, chiefly toward the end, the first edition of the “Romancero General,” which was printed at Madrid, 1600, 4to; the Tassa being dated 16th December, 1599. A copy[p. 394] of it is in the National Library at Madrid. A new edition—again with slight changes—appeared in 1602; and another in 1604. This last was reprinted, without alteration, by Juan de la Cuesta, at Madrid, in 1614. But Miguel de Madrigal had previously published the “Segunda Parte del Romancero General y Flor de diversa Poesía,” (Valladolid, 1605, 4to,) which may appropriately be added to either of the last two editions of the principal work; and thus, from nine parts, of which all four of the editions otherwise consist, extend them to thirteen parts. All these editions are in small quarto, and constitute the well-known “Romanceros Generales.”

The publication of so many different collections of ballads, in the last half of the sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth, leaves no doubt that ballads had then become known in all classes of society, and were gradually finding favor with the highest. But the Romanceros Generales were too large for popular use. Smaller ballad-books, therefore, were printed; such as the “Jardin de Amadores,” by Juan de la Puente, 1611; the “Primavera” of Pedro Arias Perez, made with much judgment, and printed in 1626, 1659, etc.; the “Maravillas del Parnaso” of Jorge Pinto de Morales, 1640; the “Romances Varios” of Pablo de Val, 1655; and several others, to say nothing of the many still less considerable collections, making only a sheet or two, which are noticed by Depping and Wolf, and which were published to meet the broad demands of the less cultivated portions of the Spanish people, just as they have been published and republished down to our own times. For similar reasons, though, perhaps, more to gratify the military taste of the age, and afford amusement to the armies in Flanders, Italy, and the Indies, selections were made from the Romanceros Generales, and contributions obtained from other sources, to make smaller and more convenient ballad-books of a stirring nature. Such is the “Floresta de Romances de los Doce Pares de Francia,” by Damian Lopez de Tortajada, the first edition of which was printed at Alcalá in 1608, (Don Quixote, ed. Pellicer, 1797, 8vo, Tom. I. p. 105,) and such is the “Romancero del Cid,” by Juan de Escobar, first printed at Alcalá in 1612 (Antonio,[p. 395] Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 684); both of which have often been reprinted since.

But towards the end of the seventeenth century, a love for the old Spanish ballads, as well as for the rest of the elder national literature, began to decay in the more favored classes of society; and, with the coming in of the eighteenth century and the Bourbon family, it disappeared almost entirely. So strong a feeling, however, and one that had struck its roots so deeply in the popular character, could not be extirpated. The ballads were forgotten and neglected by the courtly and the noble, but that the mass of the nation was as faithful to them as ever we have the plain testimony of Sarmiento, and the fact, that they were constantly reprinted for popular use in the humblest forms,—most frequently in what are called broadsides. At last, an attempt was made to replace them on their old ground. Fernandez, in 1796, printed two volumes of them in his collection of Castilian poetry, and Quintana made a small, but dainty, bouquet of them for his lyrical extracts in 1807, adding to each publication a Preface, which gave them praise high and graceful, if not such as seemed to be imbued with their own earnest spirit. Little effect, however, was yet produced at home, but some was soon apparent abroad. Jacob Grimm published at Vienna, in 1815, a small collection of the best old ballads, chiefly taken from the Romancero of 1555; and C. B. Depping published at Leipzig, in 1817, a larger one, containing above three hundred ballads, with a Preface and notes in German, the whole of which was republished in Spanish, first, with slight additions and corrections, at London, in 1825, by V. Salvá, and secondly, with very large and important additions, at Leipzig, by Depping himself and by A. A. Galiano, in 1844;—publications of great merit, which have done more than all that had been done previously to make the old Spanish ballads known in Europe generally, and which have apparently called forth the admirably spirited translations of ballads by J. G. Lockhart, 1823, and the interesting historically-arranged French versions in prose of nearly three hundred, by Damas Hinard, 1844.

A very important publication of Spanish ballads in later[p. 396] times comes, however, as it should come, from Spain itself, and was made by Don Agustin Duran, to whom early Spanish literature, in other respects, owes much. He began, in 1828, with the Moorish ballads in the Romancero General of 1614, and went on, in 1829, with two volumes of miscellaneous ballads, ending his labors, in 1832, with two volumes more, containing historical ballads and ballads of chivalry;—in all, five volumes,—the last four of which are collected from all the sources he could command earlier than the middle of the seventeenth century, and the whole of which, with additions, have been republished at Paris by Ochoa, in 1838, and at Barcelona by Pons, in 1840.

Still, a general, thorough, and critical collection of Spanish ballads is wanting;—one embracing those of the known authors, like Cueva, Padilla, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and Góngora, as well as the untold wealth that remains, and must always remain, anonymous in the elder Romanceros. When we possess such a work, and not before, we can understand and honor, as they deserve to be understood and honored, the poetry and the nationality of the old Spanish ballads, upon which, as upon its true foundations, rests the old Spanish drama. But to whom shall we look for it? Is it to Duran at Madrid, or to Wolf at Vienna, or to Huber at Berlin? I have intimations that one may be expected from Duran, and hope they may soon be fulfilled.

I have treated the “Centon Epistolario” in the text just as it has heretofore been treated; that is, as a collection of the unstudied letters of a simple-hearted, vain man, who, for above forty years, was attached to the person of John the Second, and familiar with what was done at his court. Still, the exactness and genuineness of the work have not been entirely unquestioned. Mayans y Siscar (in his Orígenes, Tom. I., 1737, p. 203) speaks of Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga, (see, ante, Vol. II. p. 500, Vol. III. p. 184,) the well-known author and diplomatist of the time of Philip the Fourth, sometimes called Vera y Figueroa, and says, “Feamente adulteró las epístolas históricas del Bachiller Fernan Gomez de Ciudad Real,”—He shamefully adulterated the historical letters of the Bachelor Ferdinand Gomez de Cibdareal; but Mayans gives no reasons or facts to support this severe charge, and he is roundly rebuked for it by Diosdado, (in his treatise “De Primâ Typographiæ Hispanicæ Ætate,” Romæ, 1794, p. 74,) who calls it “an atrocious calumny.” And again, Quintana, in his Life of Alvaro de Luna, (Vidas de Españoles Célebres, Tom. III., 1833, p. 248, note,) is so much troubled about some of the discrepancies between the Bachelor’s accounts of the death of the Constable and the known facts of history, that he, too, suggests all sorts of doubts, but ends by saying that he follows the[p. 398] Bachelor’s accounts as a sufficient authority where they are not directly contradicted by others higher and safer.

My own opinion is, that the book is a forgery from beginning to end; but a forgery so ingenious, so happy, so agreeable, that it may seem an ungracious thing to tell the truth about it, or attempt to disturb the position it has so long held in the Castilian literature of the fifteenth century. The facts on which I ground my opinion are chiefly these:—

1. No such person as the Bachelor Cibdareal is mentioned in the chronicles or correspondence of the period during which he is supposed to have lived, though our accounts from such sources are copious and minute; noticing, I believe, everybody of consequence at the court of John the Second, and certainly many persons of much less importance than the king’s confidential physician.

2. No manuscript of the Letters is known to be in existence.

3. The first notice of them is, that they appear in an edition in small quarto, black letter, one hundred and sixty-six pages, which claims to have been printed at Burgos in 1499. Of this edition, few copies have ever been seen. Antonio, who died in 1684, intimates (Bib. Vetus, Tom. II. p. 250) a doubt about the truth of its date; Bayer, in his note on the passage, 1788, says that learned men commonly supposed that Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga, (who died in 1658,) published this edition; and Mendez (in his Typographia, 1796, pp. 291 and 293) declares the edition to be unquestionably half a century later than its pretended date;—all three of these learned men being experts and good witnesses concerning a fact, which, I think, must be obvious to any person familiar with the earliest printed Spanish books, who should look on a copy of it now before me. The name of the printer on its title-page, Juan de Rei, it is important to add, is otherwise suspected.

4. The next edition of the Letters of Cibdareal is that of Madrid, 1775, edited by Don Eugenio Llaguno y Amirola, Secretary of the Academy of History, who thinks the first edition could not have been printed till after 1600;—a circumstance otherwise probable, as I am not aware that it is[p. 399] cited by any author of an earlier date. Indeed, if Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga had any thing to do with it, we must suppose it to have been printed yet later; for in 1600 that statesman was only about ten years old.

5. The Bachelor Cibdareal gives a date to no one of his letters; but so completely are the facts or hints for them to be detected in the Chronicle of John the Second, that the editor of the Letters in 1775 has been able, by means of that Chronicle, to affix its proper date to every one, I believe, of the hundred and five letters of which the collection consists. This would hardly be possible, if the two works had been written quite independently of each other.

6. The style of the Letters, though certainly adapted with great skill and felicity to its supposed period, is not uniformly true to it, erring on the side of curious archaisms. Sometimes it goes further, and uses words for which no example can be adduced. Thus the use of ca in the sense of than is wholly unjustifiable; and wherever it so occurs in the first edition, it is altered in the edition of 1775 to que, in order to make sense. Other errors more trifling might be noticed; and in the spelling there is a systematical use of c for z in words that never were spelt with a c.

7. The few words in the “Aviso al Letor,” and the still fewer that introduce the verses at the end of the volume, profess to come from the Editor, who, according to Bayer, Mendez, etc., lived after 1600, and should, therefore, have written in the style of the period when Mariana and Cervantes flourished. But he writes exactly in the style of the Letters he edits, which claim to be a century and a half older; and, what is worse, he uses in his own person the ca for que, which, as we have noticed, nobody else ever used, except his Bachelor.

8. All accounts represent Juan de Mena as having died at Torrelaguna in 1456, at the age of forty-five. (Antonio, Bib. Vetus, ed. Bayer, Tom. II. p. 266; and Romero, Epicedio, 1578, f. 486, at the end of Hernan Nuñez, Proverbios.) Now the supposed Cibdareal (Epist. 20) places Juan de Mena, in 1428,—when he was, of course, only seventeen years old,[p. 400]—on the most familiar footing at court, and makes him already historiographer to the king, and far advanced in his principal poem;—a statement the more incredible when we recollect that Romero says expressly, that Mena was twenty-three years old when he first gave himself to “the sweet labor of good learning,”—“al dulce trabajo de aquel buen saber.” See the notice of Juan de Mena, ante, Vol. I. pp. 379-388.

9. The contemptuous account Cibdareal gives of Barrientos is not one which a courtier in his position would be likely to give of a person already of great consequence, and rising fast to the highest places in the government. But, what is more, it is not the true account. He represents that distinguished ecclesiastic, as we have seen, (ante, Vol. I. p. 359,) to have burnt, in a very rash and reckless manner, a large quantity of books, from the library of the Marquis of Villena, sent to him for examination after the death of their owner, because he had been accused, in his lifetime, of studying magic,—Barrientos, as Cibdareal would have us believe, knowing nothing about the contents of the books, which he burnt, at once, only because he would not take the trouble to examine them. Now I happen to possess, in an unpublished manuscript of Barrientos, his own account of this very matter. It is in a learned treatise on Divination, which he wrote by order of John the Second, and addressed to that monarch; and in the Preface to the Second Part of which he declares that he burnt the books in question by the royal order, and intimates, that, in his own opinion, they should have been spared. “And this book,” he says, speaking of the one called “Raziel,” to which I have alluded, (ante, Vol. I, p. 359, note,) “this book is the one, which, after the death of Don Enrique [de Villena], you, as king, commanded me, your servant and creature, to burn, with many others, which I did, in presence of sundry of your servants;—a matter in which, as in many other things, you showed and still show the great devotion your Highness has always had for the Christian religion. And, although this was and is to be praised, still, for other respects, it is good in some way to preserve such books, provided they are in the hands[p. 401] and power of good, trustworthy persons, who will take heed that they be read by none but wise men,” etc.;—a very different account certainly from the one given in the letter of Cibdareal, and one which, being addressed to the king, who was necessarily acquainted with the whole transaction, can hardly have been untrue.

10. The most considerable event recorded in the Letters of Cibdareal, and one of the most considerable occurrences in Spain during the fifteenth century, is the execution of the Constable Alvaro de Luna, at Valladolid, June 2, 1452. The Bachelor says, he was with the king in that city the day it happened and the night preceding; that the king showed great irresolution as to the fulfilment of the sentence up to the last moment; that he had a sorrowful and sleepless night before it occurred; and that nobody dared to tell him the execution was absolutely over till he had eaten his dinner;—adding to these striking statements sundry picturesque local details, as if they had come within his own knowledge by his witnessing the execution. Now the truth is, that the king was not in Valladolid on that day, nor for some days before and after; and it would have been a very hard-hearted thing if he had been there at the moment when his old friend and favorite minister of state, to whom he never ceased to be attached, was brought to the scaffold, in order to satisfy the turbulent nobility whom he had oppressed. The king was, in fact, then at the siege of Maqueda, a little town northwest of Toledo, above eighty miles off, as appears by his letters still extant, dated May 29, June 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.; so that many of the circumstances recorded in Cibdareal’s letter (the 103d) are necessarily untrue. Moreover, the supposed Cibdareal places the execution of the Constable on the eve of Saint Mary Magdalen,—“Víspera de la Magdalena,”—confounding it with the date of the death of the king, which happened on that day the next year, and thus placing it on the 21st of July, which was the eve of Saint Mary Magdalen, instead of the 2d of June, which, after some discussion, long since the time when these Letters were first printed, has been determined to be the true day of the execution. This gross[p. 402] mistake in the Letters about the date of the Constable’s death was made, I suppose, in part from carelessness, and in part because that date was not then settled, as it is now. (See Mendez, Typographia, 1796, pp. 256-260; and Quintana, Vidas, Tom. III. pp. 437-439.)

11. The age in which I suppose the Letters of Cibdareal to have been forged was one in which such attempts were likely to be made. It was in Spain an age of forgeries. Guevara had just before maintained his “Marcus Aurelius” to be true history. (See, ante, Vol. I. p. 541.) The “Leaden Books” of Granada, and the “Chronicones” of Father Higuera,—the first decided by the whole civil authority of the realm to be genuine, and the second received as such by a very general consent,—were, from 1595 to 1652, at the height of their success, though both have long since been admitted to be gross frauds, which acute scholars like Montano, and historians like Mariana, must, indeed, have seen through, and were too high-minded to countenance; but which, it should be remembered, they did not feel strong enough openly to resist and denounce. In this state of opinion in Spain, some ingenious scholar—perhaps Vera y Zuñiga—as clear-sighted as they were and only a little less scrupulous, may well have been encouraged to imitate Father Higuera in a matter which, instead of being an attempt, like his, to bring false records concerning important affairs into the history of the kingdom, may have been regarded merely as a literary jeu d’esprit, intended to mislead nobody on any point except merely that of the genuineness of the correspondence. (See, ante, Vol. III. p. 152, note.)

Against all this may be urged the general simplicity and interesting details of the Letters themselves, so appropriate in their tone to the age they illustrate, and the fact, that for above two centuries they have been cited as the highest authority for the events of which they speak; a fact, however, whose importance is diminished when we recollect how rarely a spirit of criticism has shown itself in Spanish historical literature, and that even in Spanish poetry the case of the Bachiller de la Torre is, in some respects, as strong as that of the Ba[p. 403]chiller de Cibdareal, and in others yet stronger. At any rate, all we know with tolerable certainty about the Bachelor Cibdareal is, that the first edition of his Letters is a forgery, intended to conceal something, and more likely, I think, intended to conceal the spuriousness of the whole than any thing else.

A good deal has been said within the last seventy years, and especially of late, (1847-49,) about a pamphlet entitled “El Buscapié,”—“The Squib,” or “Search-foot,”—supposed by some persons to have been written by Cervantes, soon after the publication of the First Part of his Don Quixote. The subject, though not one of great consequence, is certainly not without interest, and the facts in relation to it are, I believe, as follows.

In the Life of Cervantes, by Vicente de los Rios, prefixed to the magnificent edition of the Don Quixote published by the Spanish Academy in 1780, (see, ante, Vol. II. p. 52,) it is stated, that, on the appearance of the First Part of that romance, in 1605, the public having, according to a tradition not, I think, earlier recorded, received it with coldness or censure, the author himself published an anonymous pamphlet, called “The Squib,” in which he gave a pleasant critique on his Don Quixote, insinuating that it was a covert satire on sundry well-known and important personages, without, however, in the slightest degree intimating who those personages were; in consequence of which, the public curiosity became much excited, and the Don Quixote obtained such attention as it needed in order to insure its success. (Tom. I. p. xvii.)

In a note appended (p. cxci.) to this statement of the tradition, we have a letter of Don Antonio Ruydiaz,—a person of[p. 405] whom little or nothing is now known, except that Don Vicente declares him to have been a man of learning worthy of credit,—in which letter, under date of December 16, 1775, Don Antonio asserts, that, about sixteen years earlier, he had seen a copy of the Buscapié at the house of the Count of Salceda, and had read it;—that it was a small anonymous volume, printed at Madrid with a good type and on poor paper;—that it pretended to be written by a person who had neglected to buy or read the Don Quixote for some time after its first appearance, but who, having at last bought and read it, had been filled with admiration at its merits and resolved in consequence to make them known;—that this Buscapié declared the characters in the Don Quixote to be, in the main, imaginary, but yet insinuated that they had certain relations to the designs and gallantries of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and of some of the principal personages in his government;—and that the Count de Salceda being dead, and the copy of the Buscapié in question having been only lent to that nobleman by some person unknown to the writer of the letter, he could give no further account of the matter.

This statement, differing, it will be noted, from the tradition recorded in the text to which it is appended, in what relates to the Emperor Charles the Fifth, was not, on the whole, deemed satisfactory. Pellicer, besides other strong doubts, doubted whether Cervantes wrote the pamphlet, even if all the rest related of it were true, (Don Quixote, ed. 1797, Tom. I. p. xcvii.,) and Navarrete inclined to the opinion, that there was some mistake about the whole affair, and that Cervantes could never have intended to allude to the Emperor in the way intimated (Vida de Cervantes, 1819, § 105, etc.); to which Clemencin has since added the suggestion, that the copy of the Buscapié, alleged to have been seen by Ruydiaz, might have been a forgery cunningly imposed on the Count of Salceda, who was “rich and greedy”—rico y goloso—in such matters (ed. D. Quixote, Tom. IV., 1835, p. 50). Indeed, the intimations concerning Charles the Fifth were so absurd in themselves, and the fact,—unknown when the Academy published their edition of 1780,—that four editions of the First Part of Don Quixote were, with[p. 406]in a year from the date of its appearance, demanded in order to satisfy the impatient curiosity of the public, is so decisive of its popular success from the outset, that men were, before long, disposed to believe that there never was a Buscapié written by any body. After a time, therefore, the discussion about it ceased, except among those who were interested in the smallest details of the life of Cervantes.

But in 1847 the whole subject came up afresh. Don Adolfo de Castro, a young Andalusian gentleman, much devoted to researches in early Spanish literature, and the author of several curious historical works, which give proof of his success, declared that he had accidentally found a copy of the Buscapié. In 1848 he published it at Cadiz, in a duodecimo volume, with a body of very learned notes,—the text, in large type, making forty-six pages, and the notes one hundred and eighty-eight pages, which, if printed with the same type, would make above two hundred and fifty.

In the Preface, Don Adolfo declares, that the Buscapié he thus publishes was printed from a manuscript which he had obtained from the library of Don Pascual de Gándara, a lawyer of the city of San Fernando, which library, apparently after the death of its owner, had been brought, less than three months before, to the city of Cadiz, the residence of Don Adolfo, to be publicly sold;—that the title of the manuscript, which purports throughout to be the work of Cervantes, is “The very pleasant little Book, called the Squib, in which, besides its much and excellent Learning, are explained all the hidden and unexplained Matters in the Ingenious Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by a certain Cervantes de Saavedra”;—that the manuscript in question is not in the handwriting of Cervantes, but, as appears by a memorandum following the title, is a copy made at Madrid, February 27, 1606, for Agostin de Molina, son of Argote de Molina, and that it had subsequently come into the possession of the Duke of Lafões, of the royal family of Braganza;—that it contains no allusion whatever disrespectful to the Emperor Charles the Fifth, for whom, as Don Adolfo believes, Cervantes had a sincere admiration;—that it was, according to the Aprobacion of[p. 407] Gutierre de Cetina, June 27, 1605, and that of Thomas Gracian Dantisco, on the 6th of August following, prepared for the press, but that it was not in fact printed, or it would not have been needful to make a copy of it in manuscript the next year;—and that the true and real object of the Squib was, not to attract attention to the Don Quixote, but to defend that work against many persons accounted learned, who, as Don Adolfo suggests, had attacked it with some severity.

In the Buscapié, which immediately follows these statements, Cervantes represents himself as riding on his mule one day upon the road to Toledo, a little beyond the Puente Toledana, when he sees coming towards him a Bachelor mounted on a sorry hack, that at last falls with him to the ground, in the midst of a contest between the beast and his rider, as to whether they shall go on or no. Cervantes courteously helps the stranger to rise; and then, after a few introductory words, they agree to spend together, under some neighbouring trees, the heat of the day, then fast coming upon them. The Bachelor, a foolish, conceited little fellow, with a very deformed person, produces two books for their common entertainment. The first of them is “The Spiritual Verses of Pedro de Ezinas,” which they both praise, and of whose author Cervantes speaks as of a personal acquaintance. The other is the Don Quixote, which the Bachelor treats very slightingly, and which Cervantes, a little disturbed by such contempt, maintains, in general terms, to be a book of merit, not hinting, however, to the Bachelor that he is its author, and putting his defence on the ground, that it is a well-intended attempt to drive the institution of chivalry from the world.

But the vain, garrulous little Bachelor prefers to talk about himself or to tell stories about his father, and is with difficulty brought back to the Don Quixote, which he then assails as a book absurdly recognizing the existence of knight-errantry at the time it was published, and therefore at the very time when they are talking about it,—a position which Cervantes fully admits and then defends, alleging, in proof of its truth, the examples of Suero de Quiñones and Charles the[p. 408] Fifth; while, on the other side, the Bachelor sets forth, how glad he should be if it were really so, because he would then turn knight himself, and come by a princess and a kingdom as other knights had done before him;—all in a strain as crazy as that of the hero of Cervantes, and sometimes much resembling it. Cervantes replies, maintaining the real, actual existence of knight-errantry in his own time by the examples of Olivier de Lamarche and others, which are as little to the purpose as those of Quiñones and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, already cited by him; and so the discussion goes on, until a scene occurs between the hack of the Bachelor and the mule of Cervantes, not unlike that between Rozinante and the horse-flesh of the Galician carriers, in the fifteenth chapter of the First Part of Don Quixote, and one that ends with the total overthrow and demolition of the Bachelor’s beast. This breaks up the conversation between their two riders, and brings the pamphlet to a conclusion,—Cervantes leaving the unlucky Bachelor to get out of his troubles as best he may.

On closing this gay little trifle, we are at once struck with the circumstance, that the Buscapié we have just read, avowing itself on every page to be the work of Cervantes, and declared never to have been printed till the year 1848, can have nothing at all to do with the anonymous Buscapié of which a printed copy is supposed to have been seen about the year 1759;—in fact, that it involves a formal and complete contradiction of every thing of consequence that was ever said or supposed on the subject, before it appeared. This simplifies the matter very much. It is as if a Buscapié had never before been mentioned, and we are therefore to examine the one now published by Don Adolfo de Castro as if the statement of Los Rios and the letter of Ruydiaz had never appeared.

The next thing that occurs to us is the strangeness of the circumstance, that the copy of such a work, not anonymous, but professing to have been written by the greatest and most popular genius of his nation, should, during two centuries and a half, have attracted nobody’s notice; though, during that time, it must have travelled from Madrid to Lisbon and from Lisbon back again to Spain, and though, during the[p. 409] last seventy years, a Buscapié has been much talked about and eagerly asked for.

Nor is the history of the individual manuscript now printed and offered to us, so far as it professes to have a history, more satisfactory. It claims to have been owned by three persons, and a word must be said about each of them.

First, it is said to have been “copied from another copy in the year 1606, at Madrid, on the 27th of February of the said year, for Señor Agustin de Argote, son of the very noble Señor (may he be in holy glory!) Gonzalo Zatieco de Molina, a knight of Seville.”[459] Now, that Argote Zatieco de Molina, a person I have often had occasion to mention, (see, ante, Vol. I. pp. 74, 75, 77, 117, etc.,) was, as this certificate sets forth, dead in 1606, I have no doubt. A manuscript copy of his well-known hints for the history of Seville, now in the possession of one of my friends, contains notices and documents relating to his life, collected, apparently, by the early copyist, from which we learn that Argote de Molina, by a deed dated July 5, 1597, left to his daughter, two sisters, and a brother the patronage of a chaplaincy he had founded in a chapel prepared by him for his burial-place in the church of Santiago, at Seville;[460] and that in 1600 this chapel was completed, and an inscription placed in it, signifying that it was the burial-place of Argote de Molina, late a chief of the Hermandad, and a Veintequatro, or Regidor, of Seville;[461] from all which, as well as from other grounds, it appears that Argote de Molina died between 1597 and 1600. But why is no son of his mentioned in the deed of 1597, providing for the care[p. 410] of his chapel and the protection of his family burial-place after his own death? This is explained by Ortiz de Zuñiga, the very best authority on such a point, who, when giving an account of Argote de Molina and his manuscripts, some of which Zuñiga had then in his possession, says that Argote de Molina had sons, but that they died before him, and that their loss so embittered the latter part of his life, that his reason was impaired by it.[462] What, then, are we to say about this “Agustin,” for whom Don Adolfo’s copy of the Buscapié is certified to have been made in 1606, after the death of his father, Argote, who died without leaving any son?

The second trace of this manuscript is, that it professes to have been a part of the library of the Duke of Lafões; the inscription to this effect being in Portuguese, and without a date.[463] But is it likely that such a manuscript could have remained in such a position unnoticed? Is it likely that João de Braganza, one of the most cultivated and distinguished men of his time, who was born in 1719, and died in 1806; who was the friend of the Prince de Ligne, of Maria Theresa, and of Frederic the Great; who founded the Academy of Lisbon, and was its head till his death; in whose family lived Correa de Serra, and who every evening collected the chief men of letters of his country in his saloon,—is it likely that a work avowedly by Cervantes, and one concerning which, after 1780, the Spanish Academy had caused much inquiry to be made, should have remained in the library of such a man without attracting, during his long life, either his own notice or that of the scholars by whom he was surrounded? Or, finally, as to the third and last presumed possessor of this manuscript of the Buscapié, is it likely that it would have wandered on without being recognized by any body until it found its obscure way into the collection of an Andalusian advocate,—Don Pas[p. 411]cual de Gándara,—and that even he, in the nineteenth century, when Navarrete and Clemencin were keeping alive the discussion of the eighteenth about it, should yet know nothing of its import or pretensions, or, knowing them, should withhold his knowledge from all the world?

Thus much for the external evidence, the whole of which, I believe, I have examined. It is, as it seems to me, very suspicious and unsatisfactory.

Nor can the internal evidence be accounted more satisfactory than the external.

In the first place, the Buscapié in question is a closer imitation of Cervantes than he would be likely to make of himself. It opens like the Prólogo to the “Persiles and Sigismunda,” in which the conversation that Cervantes says he held with a travelling medical student seems to have been the model for the one he is represented as holding with the travelling Bachelor in the Buscapié;—it then goes on with an examination of one or two contemporary authors, and allusions to others, in the manner of the scrutiny of Don Quixote’s library;—and it ends with an acknowledged parallel to the story of the Yanguese carriers and their beasts; different parts of the whole reminding us of different works of Cervantes, but of the “Adjunta al Parnaso” oftener than of any other. In many cases, phrases seem to be borrowed directly from Cervantes. Thus, of an author praised in the Buscapié, it is said, “Se atreve á competir con los mas famosos de Italia,” (p. 20,) which is nearly the phrase applied to Rufo, Ercilla, and Virues in the Don Quixote. In another place, (p. 22,) Cervantes is made to say of himself, when speaking in the third person of the author of Don Quixote, “Su autor esta mas cargado de desdichas que de años,” which strongly resembles the more beautiful phrase he, in the same way, applies to himself, as the author of the “Galatea”; and in another place, (p. 10,) the little Bachelor’s shouts to his mule are said to be as much wasted “as if they were tossed into the well of Airon, or the pit of Cabra,”—an allusion much more appropriately made by Cervantes in the “Adjunta al Parnaso,” where mothers are advised to threaten their naugh[p. 412]ty children, that “the poet shall come and toss them, together with his bad verses, into the pit of Cabra, or the well of Airon,”—natural caves in the kingdoms of Granada and Córdova, about which strange stories were long credited. (Semanario Pintoresco, 1839, p. 25; Diccionario de la Academia, 1726, in verb. Airon; Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Tom. IV. p. 237; and Miñano, Diccionario Geográfico.) But there is no need of citing parallel passages. The Buscapié is full of them; some being happily chosen and aptly adjusted to their new places, like three allusions to the words of Cervantes in Don Quixote about “driving books of chivalry out of the world,” (see, ante, Vol. II. p. 105, note,) and others, like those I have just cited, being awkwardly introduced, and fitting their subjects less well than they did those to which they were originally applied. But whether well or ill selected, whether well or ill applied, these phrases in the Buscapié have seldom or never the appearance of accidental coincidences arising out of the carelessness of an author repeating from himself. They seem rather to be words and forms of expression carefully selected, and are so used as to give an air of constraint to the passages where they occur, showing that the writer turns, as it were, in a narrow circle;—an air as unlike as possible to the bold and unfettered movement which is so eminently characteristic of Cervantes.

In the next place, the Buscapié contains many allusions to obscure authors and long-forgotten trifles; but, with an inconsiderable exception, which seems to be a little ostentatiously announced as such, (p. 12, and note B,) not one, I believe, occurs, that is beyond the reach of the singular learning of Don Adolfo, whose ample notes, fitting with suspicious exactness to the text, drive the reader to the conjecture, that the text may have been adjusted to the notes quite as much as the notes to the text. Now and then, this conjecture seems to be confirmed by a slight inaccuracy. Thus, in both text and notes, the name of Pedro de Enzinas—whose poetry is cited and examined just as I find it in my copy of the “Versos Espirituales,” printed at Cuenca, in 1596 (see, ante, Vol. III. p. 13, note)—is uniformly spelt many times over Ezinas, that is, with[p. 413]out the first n, (Buscapié, pp. 19-21, and note I,)—a trifling mistake, which a copyist might easily have made in 1606, or which Don Adolfo might have easily made in 1847, when transcribing, as he did, from the printed book before him, but a mistake which there is not one chance in a thousand that both should have made, if there were no other connection between the two than the one avowed. And, again, a little farther on, a mistake occurs which seems to have arisen from the very excess of Don Adolfo’s recondite learning. The old Castilian proverb, “Al buen callar llaman sage,”—or, “He is a wise man that knows when to hold his tongue,”—is found in the text of the Buscapié, (p. 26,) and Don Adolfo in the note on it (L) informs us, that, “in the same way in which this proverb is here used by Cervantes, it is to be seen in the Conde Lucanor,[464] and in other older works. Somebody corrupted it into ‘Al buen callar llaman Sancho.’” But the idea, that Cervantes adhered to an old form of the proverb, because he rejected or did not know the supposed corrupt one, is not well founded. The proverb occurs, in what Don Adolfo considers a corrupted form, as early as the “Cartas de Garay,” in 1553, and the collection of Proverbs by the learned Hernan Nuñez, in 1555, and in this very form it is, in fact, used by Cervantes himself (Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 43); for when Sancho Panza is rebuked by his master for stringing together proverbs without end, he first promises he will not utter another, and then instantly opens his mouth with this one. Indeed, I rather think that the word sage, which was in use as late as the time of Juan de Mena, had dropped out of the current language of good society before that of Cervantes. Nebrixa, before 1500, says it was then antiquated. (See Diccionario de la Academia, 1739.)

The last suggestion I have to make in relation to the genuineness of the Buscapié published by Don Adolfo de Castro[p. 414] is, that, though on its title-page it professes to explain “all the hidden and unexplained things” in the Don Quixote, it does not, in fact, even allude to one such; and though it professes to have been written by Cervantes in order to defend himself against certain learned adversaries, it does not cite any one of them, and only defends him in a light, jesting tone against the charge of the little Bachelor by admitting its truth, and then justifying it, on the ground that knight-errantry is still flourishing and vigorous in Spain,—a charge which no sensible or learned man can be supposed to have made, and a defence which is humorous, so far as it is so at all, only for its absurdity.

Other things might be mentioned, such as that Cervantes, in the Buscapié, is made to speak in a disparaging way of Alcalá de Henares, his native place, (pp. 13 and 41,) which, as we have seen, (ante, Vol. II. p. 53,) he delighted to honor; and that he is made to represent his imaginary Bachelor as talking about his own painful personal deformities, (pp. 24, 25, 28, 29,) and his father’s contemptible poltroonery, (pp. 27, 28, 34,) in a way inconsistent with the tact and knowledge of human nature which are among the strongest characteristics of the author of Don Quixote.

But I will go no farther. The little tract published by Don Adolfo de Castro is, with the exception of two or three coarse passages,[465] a pleasant, witty trifle. It shows in many parts much lively talent, a remarkable familiarity with the works of Cervantes, and a hardly less remarkable familiarity with the literature of the period when Cervantes lived. If Don Adolfo wrote it, he has probably always intended, in due time, to claim it as his own, and he may be assured that, by so doing, he will add something to his own literary laurels without taking any thing from those of Cervantes. If he did not write it, then he has, I think, been deceived in regard to the character of the manuscript, which he purchased under circumstances[p. 415] that made him believe it to be what it is not. In any event, I find no sufficient proof that it was written by Cervantes, and therefore no sufficient ground to think that it can be placed permanently under the protection of his great name.

Whatever relates to the “Don Quixote” of Cervantes is so interesting, that I will add here such an account of its different editions, translations, and imitations as may serve, in some degree, to give the just measure of its extraordinary popularity, not only in Spain, but all over Christendom.

The first edition of the First Part of Don Quixote, of which I have a copy, was printed with this title: “El Ingenioso Hidalgo, Don Quixote de la Mancha, compuesto por Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, dirigido al Duque de Bejar, Marques de Gibraleon, etc. Año 1605. Con Privilegio, etc. En Madrid, por Juan de la Cuesta,” 4to, in one volume. Three editions more appeared in the same year, namely, one at Madrid, one at Lisbon, and the other at Valencia. These, with another at Brussels, in 1607,—five in all,—are the only editions that appeared, till he took it in hand to correct some of its errors. But he did this, as I have intimated, very imperfectly and carelessly. Among other changes, he did away with the division of the volume into four parts or books, but did not take the trouble to remove from the text the proofs of such a division, as may be seen at the end of Chapters VIII., XIV., and XXVII., where the work was divided, and where, in all our editions, the proofs of it still remain. Such corrections, however, as he saw fit to make, with sometimes a different spelling[p. 417] of words, appeared in the Madrid edition of 1608, 4to; of which I have a copy. This edition, though somewhat better than the first, is yet ordinary; but, as the one containing Cervantes’s only amendments of the text, it is more valued and sought after than any other, and is the basis on which all the good impressions since have been founded. After this, an edition at Milan, 1610, and one at Brussels, 1611, are known to have been printed before the appearance of the Second Part, in 1615. So that, in nine or ten years, there were eight editions of the First Part of Don Quixote, implying a circulation greater than that of the works of Shakspeare or Milton, Racine or Molière, who, as of the same century, may be fitly compared with him.

The first edition of the Second Part of Don Quixote, which, like the first edition of the First Part, is poorly printed, is entitled, “Segunda Parte del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, por Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, autor de su Primera Parte, dirigida á Don Pedro Fernandez de Castro, Conde de Lemos, etc. Año 1615. Con Privilegio, en Madrid, por Juan de la Cuesta,” 4to. It was printed separately, Valencia, 1616; Brussels, 1616; Barcelona, 1617; and Lisbon, 1617; after which no separate edition is known to have appeared.[466]

Thus, as we have seen, eight editions of the First Part were printed in ten years, and five of the Second Part in two years. Both parts appeared together at Barcelona in 1617, in two volumes, duodecimo; and from this period the number of editions has been very great, both in Spain and in foreign countries; nearly fifty of them being of some consequence. Only five, however, need to be here particularly noted. These are,—1. Tonson’s edition, (London, 1738, 4 vols., 4to,) published at the instance of Lord Carteret, in compliment to the queen, and containing the Life by Mayans y Siscar, already noticed; the[p. 418] first attempt either to edit Don Quixote or to write its author’s life with care. 2. The magnificent edition printed by the Spanish Academy, (Madrid, 1780, 4 tom., folio,) in which the text is settled with some skill, a few notes are added, and the Life of Cervantes and an Analysis, or rather an extravagant eulogy and defence, of the Don Quixote, by Don Vicente de los Rios, prefixed. It has been several times reprinted, though not without expressions of disapprobation, especially at the indiscriminate admiration of Los Rios, who found, among other opponents, a very resolute one in a Spaniard by the name of Valentine Foronda, who, in 1807, printed in London a thin octavo volume of very captious notes on Don Quixote, written in the form of letters, between 1793 and 1799, and entitled “Observaciones sobre Algunos Puntos de la Obra de Don Quixote, por T. E.” Clemencin gives the name of the author, who is otherwise unknown to me. (Ed. Don Quixote, Tom. I. p. 305.) 3. The extraordinary edition published in two volumes, quarto, at Salisbury, in England, in 1781, and accompanied by a third volume, consisting of notes and verbal indexes, all in Spanish, by the Rev. John Bowle, a clergyman in a small village near Salisbury, who gave fourteen years of unwearied labor to prepare it for the press; studying, as the basis of his system of annotation, the old Spanish and Italian authors, and especially the old Spanish ballad-books and books of chivalry, and concluding his task, or at least dating his Prefaces and Dedication, on the 23d of April, the anniversary of Cervantes’s death. There are few books of so much real learning, and at the same time of so little pretension, as the third volume of this edition. It is, in fact, the true and safe foundation on which has been built much of what has since been done with success for the explanation and illustration of the Don Quixote, which thus owes more to Bowle than to any other of its editors, except Clemencin. 4. The edition of Juan Antonio Pellicer, (Madrid, 1797-98, 5 tom., 8vo,) an Aragonese gentleman, who employed above twenty years in preparing it. (Latassa, Bib. Nov., Tom. VI. p. 319.) The notes to this edition contain a good deal of curious matter, but this matter is often irrelevant; the number of the notes is small, and they ex[p. 419]plain only a small part of the difficulties that occur in the text. It should be observed, too, that Pellicer is indebted to Bowle further than he acknowledges, and that he now and then makes mistakes on points of fact. 5. The edition of Diego Clemencin, (Madrid, 1833-39, 6 tom., 4to,) one of the most complete commentaries that has been published on any author, ancient or modern. It is written, too, with taste and judgment in nearly all that relates to the merits of the author, and is free from the blind admiration for Cervantes which marks Vicente de los Rios and the edition of the Academy. Its chief fault is, that there is too much of it; but then, on the other hand, it is rare to find an obscure point which it does not elucidate. The system of Clemencin is the one laid down by Bowle; and the conscientious learning with which it is carried out seems really to leave little to be desired in the way of notes.

In other countries the Don Quixote is hardly less known than it is in Spain. Down to the year 1700, it is curious to observe, that as many editions of the entire work were printed abroad as at home, and the succession of translations from the first has been uninterrupted. The oldest French translation is of 1620, since which there have been six or seven others, including the poor one of Florian, 1799, which has been the most read, and the very good one of Louis Viardot, (Paris, 1836-38, 2 tom., 8vo,) with the admirable illustrations of Granville,—a translation, however, which has been somewhat roughly handled by F. B. F. Biedermann, in a tract entitled “Don Quixote et la Tâche de ses Traducteurs” (Paris, 1837, 8vo). The oldest English one is by Shelton, 1612-20, the first half of which was made, as he says in the Dedication, in forty days, some years before, and which was followed by a very vulgar, unfaithful, and coarse one by John Philips, the nephew of Milton, 1687; one by Motteux, 1712; one by Jarvis, 1742, which Smollet used too freely in his own, 1755; one by Wilmot, 1774; and, finally, the anonymous one of 1818, which has adopted parts of all its predecessors. Most of them have been reprinted often; and, on the whole, the most agreeable and the best, though certainly somewhat too free, is[p. 420] that of Motteux, in the edition of Edinburgh, 1822, (5 vols., 12mo,) with notes and illustrative translations, full of spirit and grace, by Mr. J. G. Lockhart. No foreign country has done so much for Cervantes and Don Quixote as England, both by original editions, published there, and by translations. It may be noticed further, that, in 1654, Edmund Gayton, a gay fellow about town, of whom Wood gives no very dignified account, published in London a small folio volume, entitled “Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixote,” the best of its author’s various works, and one that was thought worth publishing again in the next century, for the sake, I suppose, of the amusing vein in which it is written, but not on account of any thing it contains that will serve to explain difficult or obscure passages in the original. Some of it is in verse, and the whole is based on Shelton’s translation.

All countries, however, have sought the means of enjoying the Don Quixote, for there are translations in Latin, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Russian, Polish, and Portuguese. But better than any of these is, probably, the admirable one made into German by Ludwig Tieck, with extraordinary freedom and spirit, and a most genial comprehension of his author; four editions of which appeared between 1815 and 1831, and superseded all the other German versions, of which there are five, beginning with an imperfect attempt in 1669. It ought, perhaps, to be added, that, in the course of the last half-century, more editions of the original have appeared in Germany than in any other foreign country.

Of imitations out of Spain, it is only necessary to allude to three. The first is a “Life of Don Quixote, merrily translated into Hudibrastic Verse, by Edward Ward,” (London, 1711, 2 vols., 8vo,)—a poor attempt, full of coarse jests not found in the original. The second is “Don Silvio de Rosalva,” by Wieland, (1764, 2 vols.,) in ridicule of a belief in fairies and unseen agencies;—his first work in romantic fiction, and one that never had much success. The third is a curious poem, in twelve cantos, by Meli, the best of the Sicilian poets, who, in his native dialect, has endeavoured to tell the story of Don Quixote in octave stanzas, with the[p. 421] heroi-comic lightness of Ariosto; but, among other unhappinesses, has cumbered Sancho with Greek mythology and ancient learning. It fills the third and fourth volumes of Meli’s “Poesie Siciliane” (Palermo, 1787, 5 vols., 12mo). All these, as well as Smollet’s “Sir Launcelot Graves” and Mrs. Lenox’s “Female Quixote,” both published in 1762, are direct imitations of the Don Quixote, and on that account, in part, they are all failures. Butler’s “Hudibras,” (first edition, 1663-78,) so free and so full of wit, comes, perhaps, as near its model as genius may venture with success.

Don Quixote has often been produced on the stage in Spain; as, for instance, in a play by Francisco de Avila, published at Barcelona, in 1617; in two by Guillen de Castro, 1621; in one by Calderon, that is lost; and in others by Gomez Labrador, Francisco Marti, Valladares, Melendez Valdes, and, more lately, Ventura de la Vega; some of which were noticed when we spoke of the drama. But all of them were failures. (Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Tom. IV., 1835, p. 399, note.)

As to prose imitations in Spain, except the attempt of Avellaneda, in 1614, I know of none for above a century;—none, indeed, till the popularity of the original work was revived. But since that period, there have been several. One is by Christóval Anzarena,—“Empressas Literarias del ingeniosíssimo Cavallero, Don Quixote de la Manchuela,” (Sevilla, 12mo, without the year, but printed about 1767,)—intended to ridicule the literary taste of the times, which, after going through the education of the hero, breaks off with the promise of a second part, that never appeared. Another is called “Adiciones á Don Quixote, por Jacinto María Delgado,” (Madrid, 12mo, s. a.,) printed apparently soon after the last, and containing the remainder of Sancho’s life, passed chiefly with the Duke and Duchess in Aragon, where, at a very small expense of wit, he is fooled into the idea that he is a baron. Another, by Alonso Bernardo Ribero y Sarrea, called “El Quixote de la Cantabria,” (Madrid, 1792, 2 tom., 12mo,) describes the travels of a certain Don Pelayo to Madrid, and his residence at court there, whence he returns to his native moun[p. 422]tains, astonished and shocked that the Biscayans are not everywhere regarded as the only true nobility and gentlemen on earth. A fourth, “Historia de Sancho Panza,” (Madrid, 1793-98, 2 tom., 12mo,) is an unsuccessful attempt to give effect to Sancho as a separate and independent person after Don Quixote’s death, making him Alcalde of his native village, and sending him to figure in the capital and get into prison there;—the whole bringing the poor esquire’s adventures down to a very grave ending of his very merry life. And a fifth, by Juan Siñeriz, “El Quixote del Siglo XVIII.,” (Madrid, 1836, 4 tom., 12mo,) is an account of a French philosopher, who, with his esquire, travels over the earth to regenerate mankind; and, coming back just at the close of the French Revolution, which happened while he was in Asia, is cured, by the results of that great convulsion, of his philosophical notions; a dull, coarse book, whose style is as little attractive as its story. Perhaps there are other Spanish imitations of Don Quixote; but there can be none, I apprehend, of any merit or value.

All this account, however, incomplete as it is, of the different editions, translations, and imitations which, for above two centuries, have been poured out upon the different countries of Europe, gives, still, but an imperfect measure of the kind and degree of success which this extraordinary work has enjoyed; for there are thousands and thousands who never have read it, and who never have heard of Cervantes, to whom, nevertheless, the names of Don Quixote and of Sancho are as familiar as household words. So much of this kind of fame is enjoyed, probably, by no other author of modern times.

Two large collections of plays, and several small ones, much resembling each other, both in the character of their contents and the form of their publication, appeared in different parts of Spain during the seventeenth century, just as the ballads had appeared a century before; and they should be noticed with some care, because they exhibit the peculiar physiognomy of the Spanish national drama with much distinctness, and furnish materials of consequence for its history.

Of the first collection, whose prevailing title seems to have been “Comedias de Diferentes Autores,” it would, I suppose, be impossible now to form a complete set, or one even approaching to completeness. I possess only three volumes of it, and have seen satisfactory notices of only two more. The first of the five is the twenty-fifth volume of the collection itself, and was printed at Saragossa, in 1633, by Pedro Escuer. As is usual with such volumes of the old Spanish dramatists, it is in small quarto and contains twelve plays, seven of which are attributed to Montalvan, then at the height of his success as a living author, and one to Calderon, who was just rising to his great fame; but one of the seven plays of Montalvan belongs to his master, Lope de Vega, and the only one taken from Calderon is printed from a text grossly corrupted. The twenty-ninth volume was printed at Valencia, in 1636, and the thirty-second at Saragossa, in 1640; but I have seen neither of them. In the thirty-first, printed at Barcelona,[p. 424] in 1638, all the twelve plays are given without the names of their authors, though the persons who wrote most of them are still known; and the forty-third volume was printed at Saragossa, in 1650, containing plays by Calderon, Moreto, and Solís, with enough by more obscure authors to make up the regular number of twelve. It is no doubt singular, that, of a collection like this, extending to at least forty-three volumes, so little should now be known. But such is the fact. The Inquisition and the confessional were very busy in the latter part of the seventeenth century, when, under the imbecile Charles the Second, the theatre had fallen from its high estate; and in this way the oldest large collection of plays published in Spain, and the one we should now be most desirous to possess, was hunted down and nearly exterminated.

The next, which is the collection commonly known under the title of “Comedias Nuevas Escogidas de los Mejores Autores,”—a title by no means strictly adhered to in its successive volumes,—was more fortunate. Still it is very rare. I have never seen a set of it absolutely complete; but I possess in all forty-one volumes out of the forty-eight, of which such a set should consist, and have sufficiently accurate notices of the remaining seven.

The first of these volumes was published in 1652, the last in 1704; but, in the latter part of the period embraced between these dates, the theatre so declined, that, though at first two or three volumes came out every year, none was issued during the twenty-three years that followed the death of Calderon in 1681, except the very last in the collection, the forty-eighth. Taken together, they contain five hundred and seventy-four comedias, in all the forms and with all the characteristics of the old Spanish drama; their appropriate loas and entremeses being connected with a very small number of them. Thirty-seven of these comedias are given as anonymous, and the remaining five hundred and thirty-seven are distributed among one hundred and thirty-eight different authors.

The distribution, however, as might be anticipated, is very unequal. Calderon, who was far the most successful writer of the period he illustrated, has fifty-three plays assigned to[p. 425] him, in whole or in part, of which it is certain not one was printed with his permission, and not one, so far as I have compared them with the authentic editions of his works, from a text properly corrected. Moreto, the dramatic writer next in popularity after Calderon, has forty-six pieces given to him in the same way; all probably without his assent, since he renounced the stage as sinful, and retired to a monastery in 1657. Matos Fragoso, who was a little later, has thirty-three; Fernando de Zarate, twenty-two; Antonio Martinez, eighteen; Mira de Mescua, eighteen; Zavaleta, sixteen; Roxas, sixteen; Luis Velez de Guevara, fifteen; Cancer, fourteen; Solís, twelve; Lope de Vega, twelve; Diamante, twelve; Pedro de Rosete, eleven; Belmonte, eleven; and Francisco de Villegas, eleven. Many others have smaller numbers assigned to them; and sixty-nine authors, nearly all of whose names are otherwise unknown, and some of them, probably, not genuine, have but one each.

That the dramas in this collection all belong to the authors to whom it ascribes them, or that it is even so far accurate in its designations as to be taken for a sufficient general authority, is not for a moment to be supposed. Thirteen at least of the plays it contains, that bear the name of Calderon, are not his; one known to be his, “La Banda y la Flor,” is printed as anonymous in the thirtieth volume, with the title of “Hazer del Amor Agravio”; and another, “Amigo Amante y Leal,” is twice inserted,—once in the fourth volume, 1653, and once in the eighteenth volume, 1662,—each differing considerably from the other, and neither taken from a genuine text.

Of its carelessness in relation to other authors similar remarks might be made. Several of the plays of Solís are printed twice, and one three times; and in two successive volumes, the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth, we have the “Lorenzo me llamo” of Matos Fragoso, a well-known and, in its time, a popular play. On all accounts, therefore, this collection, like its predecessor, is to be regarded as a mere bookseller’s speculation, carried on without the consent of the authors whose works were plundered for the purpose, and[p. 426] sometimes, as we know, in disregard of their complaints and remonstrances. How recklessly and scandalously this was done may be gathered from the facts already stated, and from the further one, that the “Vencimiento de Turno,” in the twelfth volume, which is boldly ascribed to Calderon on its title, is yet given to its true author, Manuel del Campo, in the very lines with which it is ended.

Still, these large collections, with the single volumes that, from time to time, were sent forth in the same way by the booksellers,—such as those published by Mateo de la Bastida, in 1652; by Manuel Lopez, in 1653; by Juan de Valdes, in 1655; by Robles, in 1664; and by Zabra and Fernandez, in 1675, all of which have been used in the account of the theatre in the text,—give us a living and faithful impression of the acted Spanish drama in the seventeenth century; for the plays they contain are those that were everywhere performed on the national stage, and they are here presented to us, not so often in the form given them by their authors, as in the form in which they were fitted for the stage by the managers, and plundered from the prompter’s manuscripts, or noted down in the theatres, by piratical booksellers.

A remarkable discussion took place in Italy in the latter part of the eighteenth century, concerning the origin of the bad taste in literature that existed in Spain after 1600, under the name of “Cultismo”;—some of the distinguished men of letters in each country casting the reproach of the whole of it upon the other. The circumstances, which may be properly regarded as a part of Spanish literary history, were the following.

In 1773, Saverio Bettinelli, a superficial, but somewhat popular, writer, in his “Risorgimento d’Italia negli Studj, etc., dopo il Mille,” charged Spain, and particularly the Spanish theatre, with the bad taste that prevailed in Italy after that country fell so much under Spanish control; adding to a slight notice of Lope de Vega and Calderon the following words:—“This, then, is the taste which passed into Italy, and there ruined every thing pure.” (Parte II. cap. 3, Tragedia e Commedia.) Girolamo Tiraboschi, in his “Storia della Letteratura Italiana,” first published between 1772 and 1783, maintained a similar position or theory, tracing this bad taste, as it were, to the very soil and climate of Spain, and following its footsteps, both in ancient times, when, he believed, the Latin literature had been corrupted by it after the Senecas and Martial came from Spain to Rome, and in modern times,[p. 428] when he charged upon it the follies of Marini and all his school. (Tom. II., Dissertazione Preliminare, § 27.)

Both these writers were, no doubt, sufficiently decided in the tone of their opinions. Neither of them, however, was harsh or violent in his manner, and neither, probably, felt that he was making such an attack on the literature and fair fame of another country as would provoke a reply;—much less, one that would draw after it a long controversy.

But at that period there were in Italy a considerable number of learned Spaniards, who had been driven there, as Jesuits, by the expulsion of their Society from Spain in 1767; men whose chief resource and amusement were letters, and who, like true Spaniards, felt not a whit the less proud of their country because they had been violently expelled from it. With hardly a single exception, they seem to have been offended by these and other similar remarks of Bettinelli and Tiraboschi, to which they were, perhaps, only the more sensitive, because the distinguished Italians who made them were, like themselves, members of the persecuted Order of the Jesuits.

Answers to these imputations, therefore, soon began to appear. Two were published in 1776;—the first by Thomas Serrano, a Valencian, who, in some Latin Letters, printed at Ferrara, defended the Latin poets of Spain from the accusations of Tiraboschi, (Ximeno, Tom. II. p. 335; Fuster, Tom. II. p. 111,) and the second by Father Giovanni Andres, who, in a Dissertation printed at Cremona, took similar ground, which he further enlarged and fortified afterwards, in his great work on universal literary history, (Dell’ Origine, Progresso, e Stato Attuale di Ogni Letteratura, 1782-99, 9 tom., 4to,) where he maintains the dignity and honor of his country’s literature on all points, and endeavours to trace the origin of much of what is best in the early culture of modern Europe to Arabian influences coming in from Spain, through Provence, to Italy and France.

To the Letters of Serrano rejoinders appeared at once from Clement Vannetti, the person to whom Serrano had addressed them, and from Alessandro Zorzi, a friend of Tiraboschi;—and to the Dissertation of Father Andres, Tiraboschi himself[p. 429] replied, with much gentleness, in the notes to subsequent editions of his “Storia della Letteratura.” (See Angelo Ant. Scotti, Elogio Storico del Padre Giovanni Andres, Napoli, 1817, 8vo, pp. 13, 143, Tiraboschi, Storia, ed. Roma, 1782, Tom. II. p. 23.)

Meantime, others among the exiled Spanish Jesuits in Italy, such as Arteaga, who afterwards wrote the valuable “Rivoluzioni del Teatro Musicale,” 1783, and Father Isla, who had been famous for his “Friar Gerund” from 1758, took an interest in the controversy. (Salas, Vida del Padre Isla, Madrid, 1803, 12mo, p. 136.) But the person who brought to it the learning which now makes it of consequence in Spanish literary history was Francisco Xavier Lampillas, or Llampillas, who was born in Catalonia, in 1731, and was, for some time, Professor of Belles Lettres in Barcelona, but who, from the period of his exile as a Jesuit in 1767 to that of his death in 1810, lived chiefly in Genoa or its neighbourhood, devoting himself to literary pursuits, and publishing occasionally works, both in prose and verse, in the Italian language, which he wrote with a good degree of purity.

Among these works was his “Saggio Storico-apologetico della Letteratura Spagnuola,” printed between 1778 and 1781, in six volumes, octavo, devoted to a formal defence of Spanish literature against Bettinelli and Tiraboschi;—occasionally, however, noticing the mistakes of others, who, like Signorelli, had touched on the same subject. In the separate dissertations of which this somewhat remarkable book is composed, the author discusses the connection between the Latin poets of Spain and those of Rome in the period following the death of Augustus;—he examines the question of the Spanish climate raised by Tiraboschi, and claims for Spain a culture earlier than that of Italy, and one as ample and as honorable;—he asserts that Spain was not indebted to Italy for the revival of letters within her borders at the end of the Dark Ages, or for the knowledge of the art of navigation that opened to her the New World; while, on the other hand, he avers that Italy owed to Spain much of the reform of its theological and juridical studies, especially in the sixteenth centu[p. 430]ry;—and brings his work to a conclusion, in the seventh and eighth dissertations, with an historical exhibition of the high claims of Spanish poetry generally, and with a defence of the Spanish theatre from the days of the Romans down to his own times.

No doubt, some of these pretensions are quite unfounded, and others are stated much more strongly than they should be; and no doubt, too, the general temper of the work is any thing rather than forbearing and philosophical; but still, many of its defensive points are well maintained, and many of its incidental notices of Spanish literary history are interesting, if not important. At any rate, it produced a good effect on opinion in Italy; and, when added to the works published there soon afterwards by Arteaga, Clavigero, Eximeno, Andres, and other exiled Spaniards, it tended to remove many of the prejudices that existed among the Italians against Spanish literature;—prejudices which had come down from the days when the Spaniards had occupied so much of Italy as conquerors, and had thus earned for their nation the lasting ill-will of its people.

Answers, of course, were not wanting to the work of Lampillas, even before it was completed; one of which, by Bettinelli, appeared in the nineteenth volume of the “Diario” of Modena, and another, in 1778, by Tiraboschi, in a separate pamphlet, which he republished afterwards in the different editions of his great work. To both, Lampillas put forth a rejoinder in 1781, not less angry than his original Apology, but, on the whole, less successful, since he was unable to maintain some of the positions skilfully selected and attacked by his adversaries, or to establish many of the facts which they had drawn into question. Tiraboschi reprinted this rejoinder at the end of his own work, with a few short notes; the only reply which he thought it necessary to make.

But in Spain the triumph of Lampillas was open and unquestioned. His Storia Apologetica was received with distinguished honors by the Academy of History, and, together with his pamphlet defending it, was published first in 1782, in six volumes, and then, in 1789, in seven volumes, translated[p. 431] by Doña Maria Josefa Amar y Borbon, an Aragonese lady of some literary reputation. What, however, was yet more welcome to its author, Charles the Third, the very king by whose command he had been exiled, gave him an honorable pension for his defence of the national literature, and acknowledged the merits of the work by his minister, Count Florida Blanca, who counted among them not only its learning, but an “urbanity” which now-a-days we are unable to discover in it. (Sempere, Biblioteca, Tom. III. p. 165.)

After this, the controversy seems to have died away entirely, except as it appeared in notes to the great work of Tiraboschi, which he continued to add to the successive editions till his death, in 1794. The result of the whole—so far as the original question is concerned—is, that a great deal of bad taste is proved to have existed in Spain and in Italy, especially from the times of Góngora and Marina, not without connection and sympathy between the two countries, but that neither can be held exclusively responsible for its origin or for its diffusion.

Having a little enlarged the first and second volumes for the purpose, I am enabled here to present some of the very old and interesting Spanish poetry, furnished to me by Don Pascual de Gayangos, but never before published. I wish it were in my power to print more of the manuscripts in my possession, but I have not room.

No. I.

POEMA DE JOSÉ EL PATRIARCA.

The first of the manuscripts referred to is the one mentioned in Vol. I. pp. 94-99, as a poem on the subject of Joseph, the son of Jacob,—remarkable on many accounts, and, among the rest, because, in the only copy of it known to exist,—that in the National Library, Madrid, MSS. G. g., 4to, 101,—it is written entirely in the Arabic character, so that, for a long time, it was regarded as an Arabic manuscript. It has not, I believe, been deemed of a later date than the end of the fourteenth century. Indeed, its language and general air would seem to indicate an earlier one; but we should bear in mind that the Moriscos, to some one of whom this poem is due, did not make a progress in the language and culture of Spain so rapid as the Spaniards did, by whom, long before the fall of Granada, large masses of them were surrounded and kept in subjection. On this account we may conjecture the poem to have been written as late as the year 1400; but its date is uncertain.

There is little, as it seems to me, in the early narrative poetry of any modern nation better worth reading, than this old Morisco version of the story of Joseph. Parts of it overflow with the tenderest natural affection; other parts are deeply pathetic; and everywhere it bears the impress of the extraordinary state of manners and society that gave it birth. From several passages, it may be inferred that it was publicly recited; and even now, as we read it, we fall unconsciously into a long-drawn chant, and seem to hear the voices of Arabian camel-drivers, or of Spanish muleteers, as the Oriental or the romantic tone happens to prevail. I am acquainted with nothing in the form of the old metrical romance that is more attractive,—nothing that is so peculiar, original, and separate from every thing else of the same class.

The next of the Inedita is the “Danza General,” which I have noticed, (Vol. I. pp. 89-91,) and which is found in the Library of San Lorenzo del Escorial, MSS., Cas. IV., Let. b, No. 21. In note 27 on the passage referred to I have suggested a reason for conjecturing that the Spanish poem may be taken from an earlier French one; but I ought to add, that, so far as I am aware, this ghastly fiction is not known to exist in any earlier form, than that in which it appears in this Manuscript.

Aqui comienza la danza general, en la qual tracta como la muerte dice abisa á todas las criaturas, que pare mientes en la brevedad de su vida, é que della mayor cabdal non sea fecho que ella meresce. E asy mesmo les dice é requiere que bean é oyan bien lo que los sabios pedricadores les disen é amonestan de cada dia, dandoles bueno é sano consejo, que puguen en fazer buenas obras por que ayan conplido perdon de sus pecados. E luego syguiente, mostrando por espiriençia lo que dise, llama e requiere á todos los estados del mundo, que vengan de su buen grado ó contra su boluntad. Comenzando, dise ansy.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL PEDRICADOR.

BUENO E SANO CONSEJO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

[p. 461]PRIMERAMENTE LLAMA A SU DANÇA A DOS DONCELLAS.

DICE EL PADRE SANTO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL EMPERADOR.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL CARDENAL.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL REY.

DICE LA MUERTE.

[p. 463]DICE EL PATRIARCA.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL DUQUE.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL ARÇOBISPO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL CONDESTABLE.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL OBISPO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL CABALLERO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL ABAD.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL ESCUDERO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

[p. 466]DICE EL DEAN.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL MERCADERO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL ARCEDIANO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL ABOGADO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL CANÓNIGO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL FISICO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL CURA.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL LABRADOR.

DICE LA MUERTE.

[p. 469]DICE EL MONJE.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL USURERO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL FRAYRE.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL PORTERO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL HERMITAÑO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL CONTADOR.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL DIACONO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL RECABDADOR.

DICE LA MUERTE.

[p. 472]DICE EL SUBDIACONO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL SACRISTAN.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL RRABI.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL ALFAQUI.

DICE LA MUERTE.

DICE EL SANTERO.

DICE LA MUERTE.

LO QUE DICE LA MUERTE Á LOS QUE NON NOMBRO.

DICEN LOS QUE HAN DE PASAR POR LA MUERTE.

The poetry of the Rabbi de Santob, whose name and title are spelt in different ways, is here printed from the manuscript in the National Library at Madrid, marked B. b. 82, folio, beginning at f. lxi. I have spoken of it, (Vol. I. pp. 86, 87,) and would repeat the wish there expressed, that the present copy should be collated with the one in the Library of the Escurial.

Como quiera que dize Salomon, e dize verdat, en el libro de los proverbios, “quien acrecienta ciencia, acrescienta dolor,” pero que yo entiendo que a esto que el llama dolor que es trabajo del coraçon e del entendimiento. E asi no lo devemos tener al tal dolor por malo, ca el non lo dixo mal dolor, nin por que ome deue causa escusarse de la ciencia e de la buena arte en la ciencia es causa al entendido, poned le en folgura corporal e espiritual, e aun digo que Salomon antes cual e despues que escrivio e dixo en los dicho proverbios e el que acreçienta çiençia acresçienta dolor al acresçento ciencia amos del ade oy vista en la biblia que le e ... el dicho libro de proverbios e el libro de los cantares o canticores e el libro de vanidades o clesiasticas, e fiso el libro de sapiençia, amad justiçia los que judgades la tierra, e sea asy que se entiende que no lo dixo por mal dolor, casy lo el syntiera por dolor no se trabajara de acresçentar çiençia, pero este dolor es asemejado al trabajo de bien faser, que trabaja ome en yr luengo camino por alcançar conplimiento de su deseo, e es aquel trabajo folgura, gloria, e no dolor, aunque pasa por el por lo mucho del bien fase ninguno aquelo dolor, e asi que dixo, acreçienta dolor, por que quien mucho lee mucho trabaja, e mientra mas acresçienta el estudio mas acrescienta trabajo para el fruto que el entendides ssaca del tal trabajo para el fruto o dolor es de tamaña gloria que el trabajo e dolor con que se alcanço es ninguno e cosa olvidada e non sentyda, non enpecible mas antes fue, e es causa de bien e es afigurado, como sy disen a omen contar doblas para el ciento es que trabaja en el contar, pero mas pro saca myentra mas contare asi que non lo dixo por dolor es pecible ni malo, ca dolor ay que ome desea á las veses que con el avrie grant folgura e non syn el asi que es muchas veses deseado dolor et commo la tanger mañera que todavia cobdiçia aquel dolor mas que todas las folguras e viçios del mundo porque es causa de todo su deseo asi que es dolor nesçesario o provechoso, e por esto non deve çesar de fablar çiençia el que sabe por cuyta de sofrir trabajos o dolor, mayor mente que es notorio, que vyene por devyna influyda de Dios en el omen que la asi que non la da Dios para que la calle nin para quel influydo solo salvo para faser bien commo la sacra ley que dio a Muyssen non sollamente para el[p. 476] mas para ssu pueblo de generaçion e aun para todos los nasçidos que a su ley sse allegaron, como dise Ysayas en el cº.

El linaje que lo serviere sera contado a el por publico suyo asi que el sseñor da sabiduria a uno para enseñarla a muchos, e puede aqui desir que qvien quisyere pues el señor Dios commo da la sabiduria a uno para enseñarla a muchos, tan bien la podria dar á los muchos e en verdat para que o porque es esto diria yo a el respondote que tan bien podria dar Dios la ley syn que se enseñase por escritura a cada nasçido pero no se le entendia ni seria sabido que bynya de Dios, nin por acarreamiento del Espiritu Sancto asy que non seria Dios tan conoscido, e por esto es en el secreto de Dios vien lo que a nos non se entyende, ca el Señor todas las cosas que el fiso e son con sabiduria acabada que es en el asi que devemos creer que es bien aprender que quien pretende e entender del que entyende e punar en el tal trabajo que naçe dello gloria e folgura asi que non es dolor doloroso, mas es dolor provechoso. Pues asi es, plaziendo a Dios, declarare algo en las trobas de Rabisantob el Judio de Carrion en algunas partes que parescen escritas aunque no son escritas salvo por quanto son trobas e todas escritura rymada paresçe entrepatada e non lo es que por guardar los consonantes disce algunas veses lo que ha de desir despues disce lo antes. E esto quiero yo trabajar en declarar con el ayuda de Dios para algunos que pueden ser que leeran e non entenderan syn que otro gelas declare commo algunas veses la he ya visto esto por cuanto syn dubda las dichas trobas son muy notable escritura, que todo omen la deviera de curar, ca esta fue la entençion del sabio Raby que las fiso, por que escritura rimada es mejor decorada que non la que va por testo llano, e dise asy el prologo de sus rymas es veynte e tres coplas fasta de quiero desir del mundo.