models of style, and Petrarch of form, he | Vasca de Lobeira, a Portuguese, also, had preserved, as many of his countrymen to introduced the chivalrous. Montemayor, their honor did, his individual tone of on return from traveling in the musical band thought, and the peculiar, specific, undeniable of Philip II. when prince, found, like Macias, borracha, the gout de terroir, so to speak, of his lady-love married to another, and therethe Peninsula. He at one bound, such is upon recorded in his Diana, under the name the just influence of a master-mind, engraft- of Marfida, her infidelity and his sorrows, ed corrected taste in Spain, already prepared embroidering his harmonious prose with for its reception, and a Catalan, writing in tender verse. In this fanciful framework he Castilian, sealed the fate of his native dialect. depicted romantic constancy and the philoTime has scarcely diminished the effect he sophy of love-and in spite of manifold produced on his contemporaries. Spaniards improbabilities, the truth and reality of have readily accorded him the reputation feeling inspired a redeeming interest, for, worthily due to all first founders and origi- self-taught, and no scholar, he drew from nators. He lived to see his experiment fully his own heart and the fresh field; left uncarried out, and surpassed by his friend and finished, it was continued by Gil Polo. disciple, Garcilaso de Vega (1505-1536), This Diana, saved by the poetical justice of who superadded the Virgilian pastoral, and the curate from the burning, set an example has been called the Sannazaro of Spain. to Cervantes and Lope de Vega, whose GaAlthough his brief life was divided between latea and Pastores de Belem were also left gayety and hardy action, he delighted in unfinished, which none who like us have tried Arcadian themes; in practice a courtier and to read them through can regret. The late soldier, in theory a shepherd, his tone was Lord Holland was, we believe, the only man soft and sad, his style simple and appropriate, who ever actually got through Lope's entire sweet and delicate, and with far more grace "Arcadia." We may just add Fernando de than Boscan's. He was killed in an esca- Herrera of Seville (1534-1596), called the lade at Frejus, to the great grief of Charles "Divine" by Spaniards, ever fond and prodiV. The works of this Prince of Poets," as gal of titles and decorations. This reformer Cervantes termed him, have been often print- of style, sufficiently skilled in the mechanism ed, and overlaid by commentators, in his of language, endeavored to distinguish and own country; they have also been not long set apart phrases fitted for poetry from those since "done in English" by Mr. Wiffen, far, adapted to prose. He aimed also at imitative however, from successfully, as Mr. Ticknor, a harmony by selecting words whose sounds brother translator, observes. agreed with their sense; but, however admired by Spaniards for his lofty dignity, in his exalted love-worship and vehement sufferings, his overstudied language infers a greater attention to the manner of expressing than to the sentiments felt. He had not art enough to conceal his art. To our mind the single ode on the Ruins of Italica by his countryman Francisco de Rioja (obiit 1659) is, like Gray's Elegy, preferable to many a huge tome of verse. The low, minor, and melancholy tone which pervades it--alas! for the fleeting fabrics of human pride-is in true accord with the dominant key in Spanish temperaments. Infinitely superior again to Herrera was his other countryman Luis Ponce de Leon (1527-1591). This creator of the Spanish Ode was an Augustine monk and doctor of theology at Salamanca. Although sincerely pious and orthodox, and of austere and reserved habits, for only having translated into Spanish, and that for his private exercise, the Song of Solomon, he suffered five years' imprisonment, by which his health and spirits were destroyed. As with Tasso, and so many of the best geniuses of Spain, the muse

Thus Boscan and Garcilaso acclimatized these Italian exotics. Sturdy Castilejo and Castilian critics of good old Gothic principles inveighed against Petrarquistas, and their leaden feet, as no less guilty of high treason to national poetry than Luther was to orthodox Catholicity; but they labored in vain. Even the autocrat Charles V. bowed to the fashion, and got his prose translation of the Chevalier Determine turned into stanzas by the Portuguese Fernando de Acuña, who washed, ironed, and got up the imperial "linge sale," as Voltaire did many a heavy basketful for Frederic the Great.

We have neither space nor patience for mediocrities, and can only briefly mention Saa de Miranda, another Portuguese (14951548), who approached in his pastorals to Theocritus; his simple bucolics and eclogues abound in local color. He doted on the beautiful country and his ugly wife, for whose loss, good man, he died. Another Portuguese, Jorge de Montemayor (1520-1561), had the honor, as Cervantes says, to introduce to Spaniards the pastoral romance, as

and hermitage with Spain's choicest spirits. Jorge was killed in 1477, in a skirmish, and in his bosom were found unfinished verses on

the uncertainties of human hopes-the ruling passion strong in death.

hateful then to the aesthetic Leo X. than now to the liberal Pio Nono. The second Index Expurgatorius ever printed was the Spanish one of Charles V. in 1546: under his son Philip II. a priestly censorship was so firmly riveted that the publication of free thought in its highest ranges became almost impossible; and mind, driven to lower channels, sank, after expiring struggles, into an apathetic collapse, until all was stilladempto per inquisitiones et loquendi et audiendi commercio.

who dared to search for truths, much less ventured to tell them!-

The literature of Spain, with all these happy antecedents, was blighted at the moment, apparently, of most promise. At the end of the fifteenth century the mind of Europe was arising from a long, dark sleep; printing was giving wings to thought, and Columbus had thrown into Spain's lap the gold of a new continent, large enough for her The Inquisition, so congenial to Spanish awakened enterprise. Ferdinand and Isabel-character, interfered less with the pre-existla prepared the tide of their country's great-ing popular reading, and works of fancy ness-short-lived alike in arms, arts, and and imagination. It hoped, by amusing, to letters. Consolidated at home by the union prevent serious inquiry, and to fix the habit of Castile and Aragon, freed from the infidel of letting the few think for the many. Hence by the conquest of Granada-" the central amid the nearly 8,000 authors catalogued by point of her history"-Spain now stretched Nicolas Antonio, the true pioneer of Spanish her wings for a bolder flight, and, in possess-literary history, how meagre the list of those ion of kingdoms on which the sun never set, aspired to be mistress of the old and new world. At this very nick of time her intellectual progress was arrested by the Inquisition. That masterpiece of the mystery of iniquity was organized from motives of policy and finance by Ferdinand, who cared neither for letters nor for religion, was sanctioned by Isabella from sincere though mistaken piety, and was fixed and enlarged by her confessor and minister, Ximenezwho was backed by the universal applauding nation. Spain has ever gloried most in her greatest shame; with her, bigotry and patriotism had long been synonymous. Stern and life-reckless by nature, to destroy the infidel had ever been the delight and hearthardening duty of her children; and now, with suicidal alacrity, did they hail an engine armed ostensibly against unbelievers, but destined by a just retribution, when the gold and blood of heretics were exhausted, to recoil, Frankenstein-like, on themselves.

The transition from burning men to burning books was easy-in libros savitum. Isabella, it is true, at the introduction of the new art in Spain, in 1474, when the press was busy only with devotional works and the classics, had encouraged grammarians and learned men; but ere long she raised obstacles that her successors swelled to prohibition-for she gave ready ear to the warnings of Rome, which quickly foresaw the incompatibility of the free press with a system built on lies; and this peril was fully revealed aftewards by Luther, when he held up to the world his symbol of religious liberty, the Bible in print-a symbol no less

Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto.

No

The nation, "allowed to riot in a world of imagination, was kept out of that moral and physical truth;" men were compelled to respect the most terrible and ridiculous abuses of prescriptive authority, and forced to bow down to false gods; unavoidably, therefore, the literature of Spain is defective in all that deals with intellectual phenomena. Spanish Copernicus or Galileo, both of whose works figure in Rome's liber expurgatorius, fixed or enlightened the solar system of Castile; no Bacon, with his inductive experimental tests, did for nature what Descartes did for man; no Locke anatomized his understanding-no Vesalius was at freedom for his body. This father of dissection was persecuted out of the world by the Inquisition for defacing God's images. The forbidden physical and exact sciences were overridden by subtilities and dogmatism, Aristotelian metaphysics, which the Arabs had so rooted in Spain, and filthy casuistry of the Sanchez and Suares school. Pregnant inquiry was choked by the chicanery of logicians and wranglers, when things were argued from words, and points in dispute lost in definitions of terms.

Referring to Mr. Ticknor for details, if we examine the leading branches of Spain's subsequent literature, we shall find, as regards the epic, that the Poema del Cid had many followers, but few rivals. The Spaniards assign the first rank to the Araucana of Alonso

the impersonation of Spain's antagonism to France, at all times the most inveterate foe to her independence and nationality. Spaniards not less willingly rescue from the flames the Monserra e of Captain Christoral de Virues, so overpraised by the good-natured Cervantes. This spiritual epic deals, in twenty cantos, with the soul-saving miracle of Catalonia's holiest high place. Its hero is the hermit Guarin, who in one moment canceled a virtue of a century's duration by the seduction and murder of the Count of Barcelona's daughter. The cowled and bearded Lothario, doomed for his ill deed to graze on all fours like a beast, is ultimately pardoned by the Virgin. This gross legend, fitter for monks than muses, was borrowed from the Eastern Santon Barsisa, and is current also to this day in the Santo Boccadoro of Italy, although no Dante has grounded on it a Divine Comedy. Thus we find in Spain a reverend doctor writing a military romance, and a captain versifying a legend of pains and penalties; but peninsular clerks are of the Church militant, and the tendency of Spanish soldiers, when no longer fit for service, is to retire on full penance.

de Ercilla, a Biscayan (1533-1595). Certainly, although only a fragment, it is a third longer than the Iliad; and if quantity be quality, the title of the Spanish Homer was not improperly bestowed on the author by Sismondi. Ercilla's European reputation is, in fact, owing to Voltaire, who had not read him. He might rather have been compared to Lucan, a favorite but fatal model to Spaniards; but modern events seldom succeed in Epos. He lived at a moment of exaltation, when the gigantic scale of nature and events in the new world stirred up Spanish character, and recalled their heroic ages in some degree; for now, masters abroad and slaves at home, war was waged for gold, lust, and ambition, against naked Indians, and not for God and country against scimitar-flashing Moslems. Ercilla, present at the subjugation of Arauco, a mountain province in Chili, wrote on the spot, and "in the spirit," says Mr. Ticknor, "with which he fought;" but, however indisputable his descriptive talent, his over exactitude was ill suited to poetry, and fettered fancy and invention. His epic, in spite of episodes, is almost a personal narrative, a versified bulletin, and is moreover somewhat prolix and stilty; particular pasNor can we dwell on the didactic poetry sages may interest, but the subject cannot: of Spain, whether written on things in geneour sympathies are with the brave savages ral by Luis de Escobar, on painting by Pastruggling for their homes with savager Spa- blo de Cespedes, on poetry by Juan de Enniards, men of iron fronts indeed to the foe, cina and Vincente Espinel, or on medicine by but of harder hearts to the conquered. Again, Francisco de Villalobos; feeble throughout, the poem, in the words of Byron, "wants a and no masters of the arts they professed to hero." Ercilla, from a pique against Men- teach, these stringers together of commondoza, who had arrested him in a fray, kept place truisms, dear to the oriental Spaniard, the General-in-chief out of sight; an army without a head is, we admit, less unusual in the things of Spain than in Iliads, which demand an Achilles.

We pass over the infinite Caroliads, Austriadas, Pelayos, Numantias, Lepantos, and other tedious, turgid parallels to our Blackmore epics, which owe, says Mr. Ticknor, "more to patriotism than poetry," and are now deservedly dead. Nor can foreign readers be expected to wade through other rhymed compositions of mere local interest, or flattering to Spanish prejudices; and none less than the wearisome religious narratives, e. g., lives of St. Francis by Mata, of St. Benedict by Bravo, or 30,000 lines on the Redemption by Blasco; prolixity is the besetting sin of Spanish literature. Perhaps we might except from the burning the Bernardo of Dr. Bernardo de Balbuena, a Mexican, whose poem of 45,000 lines, large and unequal as his continent, is based on the deeds of the semi-fabulous paladin Bernardo del Carpio,

VOL. XXII. NO. I.

want alike the wit and worldly knowledge of Horace, the elegant finish and point of Pope.

Among professedly burlesque and mock heroics, the natural reaction of stilty bombast, unworthy childish things, albeit sanctioned by the Batrachomyomachia and Culex of the classics, may be noted the Mosquea, or war of flies and ants, by Villaviciosa, and the Gatomachia of Lope de Vega-an overdone contest between two cats, which disturbs rather than delights quiet students; nor perhaps will many such now place in a very different class the gravely designed Dragontea of the same author, written in ten cantos of octave stanzas soon after the failure of the Invincible Armada. Here we have the new variety of a solemn epic dedicated to the dishonor of its hero; violent and coarse throughout, it teems with scandal against Queen Elizabeth and her gallant Drake, and it is difficult to determine whether the poor performance be most frantic or false; at all events, it proves, as Mr. Ticknor says, how "familiar

2

and formidable" to Spaniards was the name | za's solace and companions were his books; of the singer of their King's whiskers. Lope these with ancient MSS. he collected seduin 1599 wrote 10,000 lines on San Isidro, the lously and left to the Escorial. To them ploughman patron of Madrid, whose work, and his pen-fidis sodalibus-he confided, when alive, was done for him by angels, and like Lucilius, his joys and sorrows; thus whose bones, when dead, restored Philip III. when at the mature age of 64, he, still amorto health. The age of chivalry of Juan II. ous and testy, had thrown a rival out of was not less portrayed by the l'asso honroso, a window in Philip's palace, he beguiled his than that of credulity under the bigoted imprisonment for contempt of court by wriPhilip III. was by this hagiological bucolic. ting redondillas to his lady's eyebrow; and when exiled at last to his native Granada, he there composed his masterpiece, the History of the Wars against the Moriscoes from 1568 to 1570. Called by his countrymen the Spanish Sallust, he professedly imitated Tacitus in many passages, and being a soldier and man of the world, he dared to discard the traditionary and legendary, with which Spanish history is too often overlaid. Not so Juan de Mariana (1536-1623), held in Spain to be the "Prince of Historians," and their Livy; although imprisoned by the Inquisition when 73 years old, he had never, we should say, trespassed in his history against the prudence that might have been expected from a Jesuit; hampered by Tubal Santiago and Pope-authorized miracles, which possibly he believed, and certainly did not dare question, and taking a narrow but safe view, he distinctly professed only to collect what had been before said, and put it into a better shape, in order to make his country's history better known beyond the Pyrenees; and the Inquisition should have approved— for in doing so he meritoriously abstained from any critical or irreverent sifting or analyzing of his authorities. He wrote his work first in Latin and for the learned of all countries, imitating Bembo, and then, like him, translated it into his vernacular. His style is pure and clear, and breathes Castilian gravity and nobleness. "His work," says Mr. Ticknor, "if not the most trustworthy of annals, at least is the most remarkable union of picturesque chronicling with sober history that the world has ever seen."

If we pass to history, real, philosophical, and truth-telling---in Spain, however grave and dignified, however it might assume the forms of antiquity, the living spirit was wanting; throughout it kept parallel with politics; manly and free in the earlier chronicles, now it became silent as regards the hazardous present, and, fearing to look forward, either fell back on the safe past-as in the hands of Ocampo, Morales, and Zurita; or shrank into a partial partisanship, dealing with effects, not causes; or, deserting hazardous heights, crept into local annals, lives of saints, histories of monastic and military orders the fine arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture-antiquarian, heraldic, and topographical investigations. These branches, which offer very curious indications of national character, have not been very much welcomed into the library or estimation of Mr. Ticknor, whose chief end and object are the belles letters; but fortunately the blank may be supplied by reference to his predecessors Ford and Stirling. Again, bearing in mind the literary and gastronomic tastes of Villena, the earliest Mæcenas and carver of Spain, a page might have been enriched with her blackletter culinary treatises, collectors' gems. The history of olla podridas has yet to be written: let us hope some German professor, Helluosissimus Librorum, may soon have stomach for them all.

Perhaps the first place among the historians of Spain must be assigned to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503-1575). This highborn and richly endowed soldier-scholar was ambassador of Charles V. at the Council of Among the rest of Spain's so-called histoTrent, and his stern and efficient Governor of rians, perhaps the name best known beyond Siena, and upholder of the Imperial party her limits is that of Antonio de Solis, (1610 against the Papal. A Spaniard to the back--1686,) who having written fair poetry and bone from the cradle to the grave, his tone not bad plays in his youth, divided his age of thought was firm, decided, and energetic, between devotion and the Conquest of Mexhis style classical and picturesque, his elo- ico. He, too, is compared by Spaniards to quence unadorned and free from trick; with Livy-methinks there be six Richmonds in him also originated the Picaresque, the pecu- the field-while, from the copious, sustained liar novel of Spain, of which more anon. He eloquence of his work, it is styled, by Mr. was the friend and patron of Aldus, who, by Ticknor "an historical epic." It was very reducing the ponderous folio to a handy popular-because flattering to the national form, so much facilitated reading. Mendo- vanity and showing no sympathy for the