Lope de Vega, quoting these verses as a model of poetic elevation, so opposite to the extravagances of Purism,[I] exclaimed with enthusiasm, "Here no language exceeds our own; no, not the Greek nor the Latin. Fernando de Herrera is never out of my sight."
His countrymen gave him the surname of Divine; and of all the Castilian poets on whom that title has been bestowed, none deserved it but he. In spite of this glory, and the praises of Lope, his style and principles of composition had then but few imitators; nor, till the re-establishment of good taste in our own times, has the eminent merit of his poetry, and the necessity of following his steps to elevate the poetic above the vulgar language, been properly appreciated. Don Juan de Arguijo imitated him in his sonnets, a little curtailing the style of that excessive ornament which sparkles in Herrera; but the poet who improved infinitely upon Arguijo was Francisco de Rioja, a Sevillian like the other two, and a disciple of the same school, although he flourished several years afterwards.
Equal in talent to Herrera, and superior in taste, Rioja would, doubtless, have fixed the true limits between the language of poetry and prose, if he had written more, or if his compositions had but been preserved. How is it possible that a man of so great a genius, and who lived so many years, should have written no more than one ode, one epistle, thirteen silvas, and as many sonnets? It is easier to believe that his writings were lost in the different vicissitudes which his life sustained, or that they lie forgotten with the many other literary monuments which, in Spain, wrestle still with dust and worms. The few that he has left are sufficient, notwithstanding, to give us an idea of his poetic character, superior to others for nobleness and chasteness of phrase, for novelty and choice of subject, for the force and vehemence of his enthusiasm and fancy, and for the excellency of a style always pure without affectation, elegant without superfluity, without tumidity magnificent, and adorned and rich without ostentation or excess. A merit which particularly distinguishes him is the happy success with which he constructs his periods, which neither grow dull from brevity, nor cumbrous from prolixity; a great and frequent defect amongst the poets of Spain, whose sentences, ill distributed, fatigue the voice when recited. I am well aware that, even in these few compositions, there are traces of that prosing which marked the poets of the sixteenth century, and of the tinsel of the following one; but, besides that these are very rare, it should be kept in mind that he neither polished nor arranged his verses for publication; a circumstance that would sufficiently excuse yet greater errors. But whatever importance may be attributed to such defects, none will be able to deprive the delicate Silvas to the flowers, the magnificent ode on the ruins of Italica, and the almost perfect moral epistle to Fabio, of the foremost rank which they enjoy amongst the poetical treasures of Spain.
To the last third division of the sixteenth century belong other poets, celebrated then, but of a merit and order very inferior to those already named:—Juan de la Cueva, who more properly belongs to the history of comedy, is considered amongst its first corrupters; Vicente Espinel, to whom music owes the introduction of the fifth chord in the guitar, and poetry the combination of rhymes in octosyllabic verses, to which was then given the name of espinela, but which are now better known under that of decima; Luis Barahona de Soto, author of Las Lagrimas de Angelica, a poem very celebrated then, and read by no one now; Pablo de Cespedes, sculptor, painter, and poet, in whose didactic poem on Painting breathes, at times, the vigorous and picturesque style of Virgil; Pedro de Padilla, whom some esteemed highly for his pure diction and fluent versification, but poor of fancy and fire; and lastly, others less noted, who cultivated the art, and who, if they did not obtain a great reputation in it, contributed with the rest to give to verse and style more ease, harmony, and copiousness.
None of the authors of this time equalled the Argensólas in severity of sentiment, facility of rhyme, or correctness and propriety of language. They are so paramount in this last quality, that Lope de Vega says of them, that they came to Castile from Arragon to teach the Castilian language. Their learning, the dignity of their maxims, their connexions, and the great protection extended to them by the Count de Lemus, were the causes of that kind of sovereignty which they exercised over their cotemporaries, and of that authority recognised and confirmed by the praises that were lavished on them from all quarters. They have been entitled the Horaces of Spain, and have ever been regarded as poets of the first rank, preserving a reputation almost as inviolate as Garcilasso himself.
Without intending to diminish the just esteem which is their due, or to contend with their many admirers, we may observe, that their fame appears to us much greater than their merit; and that if language owes them much for the exact attention and propriety with which they wrote it, poetry is indebted to them less, and that their reputation appears to rest more on their freedom from the vices, than on any great display of the virtues of composition. In lyric poetry they are easy, pure, and ingenious; but generally devoid of enthusiasm, majesty, and fancy. As little have they in their love pieces the grace and tenderness which erotic poetry requires; and if we except some sonnets of Lupercio, not one of their compositions in this class can be quoted as deserving to arrest the attention, or be recommended to the memory of lovers. I will not speak of the Isabella and the Alexandra, as it is evident to all, even without the necessity of a profound acquaintance with the subject, that these compositions have nothing of the tragedy in them but the name, and the coolly atrocious deaths with which they end. Their severe character, the bias of their disposition, more ingenious and neat than florid and expansive, the wit and mirth which at times they knew how to fling forth, were more fit for moral and satiric poetry, in which they have succeeded best. There are in them an infinite number of strokes, some valuable for their depth and boldness, and many for that ingenuity of thought, that facility and propriety of expression, which has rendered them proverbial.
These passages, extracted from various satires of Bartolomé, and many others of equal or superior merit, which might be quoted as well from him as from Lupercio, prove their happy genius for this kind of poetry. They have been compared to Horace, and undoubtedly bear most similarity to him, notwithstanding the preference that Bartolomé gave to Juvenal.[J] But at what a distance do they stand from him! The vivacity, the freedom, the variety, the conciseness, the exquisite and delicate mixture of praise and censure, the amiable disdain, and spirit of friendship, which enchant and despond in that ancient model, are all wanting in them, and condemn the excessive condescension or want of taste which led their cotemporaries to give them the title of Horaces. Facility of rhyming led them to string tercetos together without end, in which, if we meet with no unnecessary words, we find plenty of unnecessary thoughts. This causes their satires and epistles frequently to appear prolix, and even at times wearisome. Horace would have counselled Lupercio to shorten the introduction of his satire on the Marquesilla, and many of the tales that occur in it; and Bartolomé to suppress, in his fable of the Eagle and Swallow, the long enumeration of birds, useless and unseasonable for a poet, superficial and scanty for a naturalist; he would have reminded both, in short, that strokes of satire, like arrows, should carry feathers and fly, to wound with certainty and force. It is painful, on the other hand, to find that they never leave the tone of ill-temper and suspicion which they once assume; and that neither indignation against vice, nor friendship, nor admiration, can draw from them one warm sentiment or gleam of enthusiasm. We choose friends amongst the authors we read, as amongst the men we have to deal with: I confess that I am not for those poets who, to judge by their verses, never appear to have loved nor esteemed any body.
Villegas was a disciple of the younger Argensóla, and if to the native talent he had joined some portion of the judgment and good sense of his master, he would have left nothing to desire in the department which he cultivated. He was the first that introduced Anacreontics in Spanish poetry, and, in spite of their defects, his Cantilenas and Monostrophes are read with delight, and remain imprinted on the minds of youth. The cause of this is, that there is vivacity in them, playfulness, grace, and cadence, which are the qualities that characterise this class of compositions, charming alike the imagination and the ear. His longer verses have not had equal success, because their ease, their harmony, and learning, do not compensate for the dissatisfaction caused by affectation, pedantry, and want of enthusiasm, for the violent transpositions, vicious modes of speech, and, lastly, the ringing changes and puerile antitheses in which they abound.[K]
He attempted another innovation, which required for its establishment greater powers than his. He set himself to compose Castilian sapphics, hexameters, and distichs; and although the specimens he published are not altogether unsuccessful, especially the sapphic, from its analogy to endecasyllabic verse,[L] he has had no successor in this enterprise. The hexameter demands a prosody more determinate and fixed than the Spanish language possesses, to satisfy the ear; and therefore the imitation of it is so much the more difficult, not to say impossible. He would, doubtless, however, have enriched the art by establishing this novelty, had it not been necessary, for this purpose, that the art were then in its infancy, in order that the docile and flexible language might accommodate itself to the will of the poet, and had he been the colossal genius that could subjugate others, and dictate to them a law of like versification. It was an unfortunate time to introduce fresh measures, when the fine endecasyllabics of Garcilasso, Leon, and Herrera were known, and when the consistency and fixedness of the language and poetry did not permit them to retrocede to their infancy, which was absolutely necessary to exercise them in the manège of Latin versification.
The reputation of this poet did not then correspond to the proud hopes he cherished when he published his book. In this, he insulted Cervantes, scoffed at Góngora, jested with Lope de Vega; and, fancying himself some superior star about to eclipse his cotemporaries, he represented himself at the head of his Eroticas, as a rising sun extinguishing the stars with its rays, and raised the arrogant note,—Sicut sol matutinus: me surgente, quid istæ? Even if he had united in himself the talents of Horace, Pindar, and Anacreon, in all their extent and purity, from which he was yet far distant, this would have been an unpardonable boast, which not even his youth could excuse. The public is always greater than any writer, how great soever he may be; and it is necessary for him to present himself before it with modesty, unless he wishes to pass for a madman or a fool. Villegas, after impertinently irritating his equals, caused no sensation on the public, but attracted the rude and biting sarcasms of Góngora, and the just and moderate reprehension of Lope.[M] He was consigned to oblivion till the appearance of the Parnaso Español, in which collection he had an eminent place; from that time, he was again printed, with a prefatory discourse, in which Don Vincente de los Rios, a man of vast learning and exquisite taste, but on this occasion too good-natured, assigned to him the palm of lyric poetry, which no subsequent critic has confirmed.
The Spanish poets had cultivated up to this time almost every species of Italian versification. The harmonious and rounded octave, the exact and laborious terza, the artificial sonnet, the trifling sextine, the canzone in its infinite combinations, and blank verse, although for the most part extremely ill managed[N]—were the forms of all their compositions, which came to be reflections, more or less luminous, of ancient, and of Tuscan poetry. Some coplas and trobas were made, though very few, in which the taste prior to Garcilasso prevailed; but when the use of the asonante[O] became general in the last third division of this sixteenth century, the taste and inclination for Romances became equally in vogue, and in them were continued, and, as it were, perpetuated, the old Castilian poesies.
Utterly stript of the complexity and force, to which imitation in other kinds of writing obliged them to have recourse, their authors little caring for a resemblance with the odes of Horace, or the canzone of Petrarch, and composing them more happily by instinct than by art, the Romances could not have the pomp and loftiness of the odes of Leon, Herrera, and Rioja. Yet were they peculiarly the lyric poetry of Spain: in them music employed its accents; they were heard at night in the halls and gardens to the sound of the harp or guitar; they served as the vehicle and the incentive of love, as well as shafts for satire and revenge; they painted most happily Moorish customs and pastoral manners, and preserved in the memory of the vulgar the prowess of the Cid and other champions. In fine, more flexible than other kinds of composition, they accommodated themselves to all kinds of subjects, made use of a language rich and natural, clothed themselves with a mezzo-tinto soft and sweet, and presented on every hand that facility and freshness which rise from originality, and which flow without effort and without study.
There are in them more fine and energetic expressions, more delicate and ingenious passages, than in the whole range of Spanish poetry besides. The Morisco ballads, in particular, are written with a vigour and a sprightliness of style that absolutely enchant. Those customs in which prowess and love are so beautifully blended, those Moors so gallant and so tender, that so romantic and delicious country, those names so sweet and so sonorous, each and all contribute to give novelty and poetry to the compositions wherein they are portrayed. The poets afterwards grew weary of disguising gallantries under the Morisco dress, and had recourse to the pastoral. Then to challenges, tournaments, and devices, succeeded green meads, brooks, flowers, and ciphers carved on trees; and what the Romances lost in vigour by the change, they gained in sweetness and simplicity.
The invention in both kinds was beautiful, and it is wonderful to see with how little effort, and with what conciseness, they describe the scenery, the hero, and the feelings that agitate him. Now, it is the alcayde of Molina, who, entering the town, alarms the Moors by the report that the Christians are ravaging their fields; now, it is the unfortunate Aliatar, borne bloody and lifeless to his grave in melancholy pomp through the very gate whence the day before he was seen to issue, full of gaiety and life: there it is a simple beauty, who having lost her earrings, the keepsake of her lover, is in great affliction, dreading the reproaches that await her; and here it is the solitary and rejected shepherd, who, indignant at the sight of two turtles billing in a poplar, scares them away with stones.
The defects of these compositions spring from the same source as their beauties, or, to speak more correctly, are the excess or abuse of those very beauties. Their facility and freedom often degenerated into negligence and slovenliness, their ingenuity into affectation; puns, conceits, and false ornaments were introduced with so much the more liberty, as they more assisted those flights of gallantry which passed for refinements of speech, and as they appeared more excusable in works written merely for self-amusement. The principal authors of this poetry cannot be decidedly ascertained; but the golden epoch of the Romances was before Lope de Vega, Liaño, and a thousand others, not even remembered, introduced the bad taste which afterwards corrupted the whole literature of Spain; it comprises the youth of Góngora and Quevedo, and terminates in the Prince de Esquilache, the only one after them that succeeded in giving to the Romances the colouring, grace, and lightness, which they formerly possessed. But this taste, if on the one hand it tended to popularize poetry, to give it greater ease and sweetness, and to remove it from the bounds of imitation, to which former poets had restricted it, had an equal influence in making it incorrect and careless, the same facility of composition inviting to this looseness. Thus it is that the poets who flourished at the end of the sixteenth, and commencement of the succeeding century, more harmonious, more easy, more delightful, and above all, more original than their predecessors, will be found at the same time more negligent, and to exhibit less artifice and polish, less purity and correction in their style and diction.
At this period lived the three poets whose verses have possessed most amenity, richness, and facility. The first is Balbuena, born in La Mancha, educated in Mexico, and author of El Siglo de Oro and of Bernardo. No one, since Garcilasso, has had such command over the language, versification, and rhyme; and no one, at the same time, is more slovenly and unequal. His poem, like that New World in which the author lived, is a country spacious and immense, as fruitful as uncultivated, where briers and thorns are mingled in confusion with flowers, treasures with scarcity, deserts and morasses with hills and forests more sublime and shady. If at times he surprises by the freedom of his verse, by the novelty and vividness of his expression, by his great talent for description, in which he knows no equal, and even occasionally by his boldness and profundity of thought, he yet more frequently offends by his unseasonable prodigality, and inconceivable carelessness. The greatest defect of the Bernardo, is its excessive length; it being morally impossible to give to a work of five thousand octaves the sustained and continued elegance necessary to give pleasure. The eclogues of the Siglo de Oro have not the same defects of composition as the poem, and in the public estimation enjoy the nearest place to those of Garcilasso. They undoubtedly deserve it, considering the propriety of style, the ease of the verse, the suitableness and freshness of the images, and the simplicity of the invention. If his shepherds were not at times so rude, if he had had a more constant eye to elegance in diction, and beauty in the incidents; if, in short, he had thrown more variety into his versification, reduced almost entirely to tercetos,—there is no doubt but that good taste would have conceded to him in this branch of the art an absolute supremacy.
The second of these poets is Jauregui, celebrated for his translation of the Aminta, a florid poet, an elegant and harmonious versifier. He is the one who expressed his thoughts in verse with the most ease and elegance; but he had little nerve and spirit, and was, besides, poor of invention. His taste in early life was very pure, as his Rimas show. But after having been one of the sharpest assailants of Purism, he ended in suffering himself to glide with the current, and in his translation of the Pharsalia, and in his Orpheus, he has abandoned himself to all the extravagances he had before burlesqued.
But the man who received from nature the most poetical endowments, and who most abused them, was, without doubt, Lope de Vega. The gift of writing his language with purity, elegance, and the deepest clearness; the gift of inventing, the gift of painting, the gift of versifying in whatever measure he desired; flexibility of fancy and talent to accommodate himself to all sorts of writing, and to all sorts of colouring; a richness that never knows impediment or dearth; a memory enriched by a vast range of reading; and an indefatigable application, which augmented the facility he inherited from nature: with these arms he presented himself in the arena, knowing in his bold ambition neither curb nor limit. From the madrigal to the ode, from the eclogue to the comedy, from the novel to the epic—he ran through all, he cultivated all, and has left in all signs of devastation and of talent.
He brought the theatre under his subjection, and fixed upon him universal attention,—the poets of his time were nothing compared to him. His name was the seal of approbation for all; the people followed him in the streets; strangers sought him out as an extraordinary object; monarchs arrested their attention to regard him. He had critics who raised the cry against his culpable carelessness, enviers who murmured at him, detractors who calumniated him,—a mournful example, in addition to the many other instances which prove that envy and calumny are born with merit and celebrity; for neither the amiable courtesy of the poet, nor the placidity of his genius, nor the pleasure with which he lent himself to commend others, could either disarm his slanderers or temper their malignity. But none of them could snatch away the sceptre from his hands, nor abrogate the consideration which so many and such celebrated works had acquired for him. His death was mourned as a public calamity; his funeral drew an universal attendance. A volume of Spanish poetry was composed upon his death, another of Italian; and, living and dying, he was always hearing praises, always gathering laurels; admired as a prodigy, and proclaimed "the Phœnix of Wits."
What, at the end of two centuries, remains of all that pomp, of all the loud applauses which then fatigued the echoes of fame? When we see that, of all the poetry and poems he composed, there are few, perhaps none, which can be read through without our being shocked at every step by their repugnance; when we see that his most studied and favourite work, the Jerusalem,[P] is a compound of absurdities, wherein the little excellence we meet with, makes the abuse of his talent but the more deplored; when we see that of so many hundreds of comedies, there is scarcely one that can be called good; and finally, that of the many thousands of verses which his inexhaustible vein produced, there are so few that remain engraved on the tablets of good taste,—can we do less than exclaim, where are now the foundations of that edifice of glory raised in homage of a single man by the age in which he lived, and which still surprises and excites the envy of those who contemplate it from afar?
It was not possible for works written with so much precipitation to have any other result, with his utter forgetfulness of all rules, and neglect of all great models; without plan, without preparation, without study, or attention to nature. The necessity of writing hastily for the theatre, when he had accustomed the public to almost daily novelties, unsettled, and, as it were, relaxed all the springs of his genius, carrying the same hurry and negligence into all his other writings.[Q] Hence it is that, with the exception of some short poems in which he improved the happy inspiration of the moment, there are, in all his others, unpardonable faults of invention, of composition, and of style. Fatal facility! which corrupted all his excellencies, which led him to obscure the clearness, the harmony, the elegance, the freedom, the affluence, and even the strength with which he was alike gifted; giving place to unappropriate figures, to historic or fabulous allusions pedantic and ill-timed; to frigid and prolix explanations of the very thing he had said before; to weakness in short, to shallowness, to an insufferable tone, into which the rich abundance and amiable purity of his diction and versification degenerated.
The age then, it will be said, was barbarous, that tolerated such errantries, and that gave so much applause to a writer so defective. It was not barbarous, but excessively compliant. There were many men of talent who deplored this abuse; but they could not resist the popular approbation which the nature of Lope's writings carried with it, and which in some degree his genius authorized. The general sweetness and fluency of his verse; the lucidness of his expression, intelligible almost always to the most illiterate; the fine and polished language of gallantry which he invented, and brought into use in his comedies; the decorum and ornament with which he invested the stage;[R] the vivid and delicate touches of sensibility which he from time to time presents; the eminent and brilliant parts which the women generally sustain in his works; in short, his absolute dominion in the theatre, where acclamations have most solemnity and force; are all circumstances which concur to excuse the public of that day, who were not unjust in admiring most the individual that gave them most delight.[S]
To restore to Castilian poetry the tone and vigour which were failing it, the powers of Horace and Virgil, with all the grandeur of their genius, the perfection of their taste, and the high protection they enjoyed, would scarcely have sufficed. Two men in Spain applied themselves to this task; both of great talent, but of a depraved taste, and of different pursuits. Their defects, which they sometimes relieve by better qualities, had the effect of a contagion, and produced consequences more fatal than the evil itself which they sought to remedy.
The first was Don Luis de Góngora, the father and founder of the sect called Purists. All know that after a century of adoration by the followers of his style, Luzán and the other professors who re-established good taste, set themselves to destroy the sect by decrying their founder; and with them Góngora and the detestable poet, were terms synonymous. But this was unjust; and in him, the brilliant, gay, and pleasant poet, should ever be distinguished from the extravagant and capricious innovator. His independent genius was incapable of following, or of imitating any body; his imagination, fiery and vivid in the extreme, could not see things in a common light; and the weak and pallid colouring of other poets will not bear comparison with the rich emblazonry, if we may so say, of his style and expression. In which of them are poetical periods met with, that in wealth of language, brilliancy, and music, can be compared with the following?
In which are images more delicate and appropriate, or more naturally expressed, than these?
There is not in all Anacreon a thought so graceful as that of the song, wherein, presenting some flowers to his lady, he begs from her as many kisses as he had received stings from the bees that guarded them.
If from Italian measures we pass to Letrillas and the Castilian Romance, Góngora will be found king of that class, which has received from no one so much grace, so many splendours, and so much poetry. His merit indeed, in this department, is so great, and specimens of his success in it are so common, that there remains no other difficulty to prove it than that of choice. This fragment will suffice for our purpose.
How could a writer possessing this strength and richness afterwards abandon himself to the pitiable frenzies in which he lost himself, without preserving even a shadow of their excellences! Thinking that the poetic period was enervated, and looking upon nature as poverty, purity as subjection, and ease as looseness, he aspired to extend the limits of the language and poetry, by the invention of a new dialect which should re-elevate the art from the plain, dull track into which, according to him, it was reduced. This dialect was distinguished by the novelty of the words, or by their application; by the singularity and dislocation of the phrase, or by the boldness and profusion of its figures; and in it he not only composed his Soledades and Polifemo, but distorted, after the same manner, almost all his sonnets and songs, sprinkling as well with a sufficient number of false ornaments his romances and letrillas.
If Góngora, to the excellent qualities he possessed, had joined the judgment and good taste he wanted; if he had made the same profound study of the language as Herrera, both meditating on the resources which the idiom presented, and attending to its character, richness, and harmony, then would have followed the result he desired, and he would, perhaps, have gained the glory of being the restorer, and not the opprobrium of having been the corrupter of the art. But the same circumstance befel him which befals all who seek to erect a building without foundations; he gave into a world of freaks and extravagances, into an abominable gibberish, as opposite to truth as to beauty, and which, whilst it was followed by a multitude of the ignorant, was censured by as many as yet preserved a spark of sense and judgment.
"He sought," says Lope de Vega, "to enrich the art, and even the language, with such figures and ornaments, as were never, till his time, imagined or beheld. In my opinion, he fully succeeded in what he aimed at, if this was his aim; the difficulty is in receiving it. According to many, he has raised the novelty into a peculiar class of poetry, and they are not at all mistaken; for, in ancient times, men were made poets by the study of a whole life; in the modern, they become poets in a day; as, with a few transpositions, four precepts, and six Latin words or emphatic phrases, you will see them elevated where they neither know nor understand themselves. Lipsius wrote that new Latin which good judges in these matters say Cicero and Quintilian laughed at in the other world. The whole foundation of the structure is transposition; and what makes it the more harsh is the so far separating the substantive from the adjective, where the parenthesis is impossible: it is a composition full of tropes and figures; a face coloured in the manner of angels with the trumpet of judgment, or of the winds in maps. Sonorous words and figures enamel an oration; but if the enamel covers all the gold, it is no longer a grace to the jewelling, but a notable deformity." And in another part he says, "..., without going in search of so many metaphors on metaphors, wasting in rouge what is needed in features, and enfeebling the spirit with the weight of such an excessive body. This it is that has destroyed a great number of talented men in Spain, with such deplorable effect, that an illustrious poet, who, writing with his native powers and in his proper language, was read with general applause, since he has abandoned himself to purism, has lost it all."
Not satisfied with these demonstrations of severity, this placid man, who scarcely knew what malignity was, thought it his duty to persecute the pest as with fire and sword, and in his comedies, in the burlesque poetry of Burguillos, in the Laurel de Apollo, and in a thousand other places, ridiculed and cursed this kind of poetry, which he characterized as "an odious invention to make the language barbarous." He was aided in this warfare by Jauregui, Quevedo, and some others; but their efforts were unavailing, and they themselves were at length forced to yield to the contagion. For though they cannot be called Purists in all the rigour of the term, they adopted some of the elements which composed the dialect, such as violent transpositions, extravagant hyperboles, and incoherent figures. Góngora, meanwhile, as he had never known restraint or subjection, fulminated against his adversaries the grossest taunts; and, fierce and proud from the applauses of the ignorant, internally exulted with all the glory of a triumph. This was increased by the support given to his party by the celebrated preacher, Fray Hortensio Paravicino, from the great influence which he had with the theologians and sacred orators, and by the unfortunate Count de Villamediana, in the secret and powerful favour which he was supposed to have at court. Both imitated Góngora, and drew after them other writers of less note, propagating thus this barbarous language till the middle of the century in which Luzán and other admirable critics entirely succeeded in weaning the nation from it.
At the same time with the Purists appeared the Concettisti, punsters, and utterers of grave saws in frigid and sententious language: D. Francisco de Quevedo surpassed all, as well by his merit as influence, in the progress of these different sects. Quevedo, according to some, is the father of laughter, the treasury of jests, the fountain of wit, the inventor of a number of happy words and phrases, in a word, the Comus of Spain. According to others, he is, on the contrary, a writer inauspicious to the beauty and decorum of wit: his humour, say they, instead of being festive, is low buffoonery; he has impoverished the language, depriving it of an infinite number of modes of speech, once noble and becoming, now, thanks to him, low and indecorous; and if he at any time amuses, it is by the original extravagance of his follies. These two judgments, so contradictory, are yet both true; and if we consider attentively the character of this writer, we shall see what foundation both the one and the other have for their censures and applauses. Quevedo was every thing in excess: no one, in the same manner, displays in the serious a gravity so rigid and morals so austere; no one, in the jocose, shows a humour so gay, so free, and so abandoned to the spirit of the thing. In the choice of his subjects, we are alike sensible of this contrariety. Alguazils, scriveners, procuresses, compliant husbands, ruffians, and women of easy access, generally form the subject matter of his buffooneries; and we must, in justice, acknowledge that he very often lashes them in a masterly manner. At another time a theologian and stoic, he translates Epictetus, comments on Seneca, interprets Scripture, and entangles himself in the useless labyrinths of metaphysics; lost labours, which, for the most part, are no longer read, and which have scarcely any other merit than their astonishing erudition.
From this contradiction springs so often the effort and difficulty with which he writes in both kinds of composition. His style, in prose as in verse, in serious as in jocose, is always struck forth without connexion or graduation, sacrificing almost always truth and nature to exaggeration and hyperbole. His imagination was most vivid and brilliant, but superficial and negligent; and the poetic genius that animates him, sparkles but does not glow, surprises but does not agitate, bounds with impetuosity and force, but neither flies nor ever supports itself at the same elevation. The rage of expressing things with novelty made him call the brink of the sea the law of the sand; love, the civil war of the born; trunks of trees on which lovers' names are engraved, a rural book written in enamel. In burlesque verse, he heaps together forced allusions, ambiguities, and paragraphs of nonsense. A ruffian, to denote how keenly he has felt his disgrace, will say, that he has wept rope for rope, and not, at every lash; he will say, that he has had more grasshoppers than the summer, more tenants than the tomb, more bookstrings than the missal. I am well aware that Quevedo often diverts with what he writes, and raves because it is his pleasure: I know that puns have their proper place in such compositions, and that no one has used them more happily than he. But every thing has its bounds; and, heaped together with a prodigality like his, instead of pleasing, they create only weariness.
The same incorrectness and bad taste that mark his style, composed of words and phrases noble and sublime, united with others as mean and trivial, are found in his images and thoughts, which are mixed together without economy, judgment, or decorum. The following sonnet will show this miserable confusion better than any description:—