English writer; but it is possible that his sententious antithetical style had some share in producing euphuism. Guevara is also worth notice as an early, though not the earliest, example of the pretentiousness and the tendency to wordy platitude which have been so fatal in Spanish literature. He had knowledge both of books and the world, and some command of sarcasm. These qualities were, however, swamped in the "flowing and watery vein" of his prose style. No writer ever carried the seesaw antithetical manner to a more provoking extent. To make one phrase balance another appears to have been his chief aim, and in order to achieve this end he repeated and amplified. In his own time, when whatever was at once sound as moralising, learned, and professedly too good for the vulgar was received with respect, Guevara had a wide popularity both in Spain and abroad. To-day he is almost unreadable, and for a reason which it is easy to make clear. It is known that La Fontaine took the subject of the Paysan du Danube from the Golden Epistles indirectly if not directly. Spaniards may be found to boast that there is nothing in the fable which is not in their countrymen. This is partly true, but it is stated in the wrong way. The accurate version is that there is nothing in Guevara's prose which is not in La Fontaine's verse, but that it is said in several hundred times as many words, and that the meaning (not in itself considerable) is smothered in tiresome digressions and amplifications.

A few words, and they need be very few, on the in

fluence of the Inquisition seem not out of place in a The influence of history of any part of Spanish life in the the Inquisition. sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are even to be justified by the fact that its oppressive influence has been called on to account for the withering of the national will and intelligence, which dried up the very sources of literature. The prevalence of the destructive affectation called Góngorism has been excused by Mr Ticknor on the ground that men were driven back on mere playing with words because the Inquisition made thinking dangerous. But we are met at once by the problem of the Sufi pipkin. It is hard to tell which is potter and which is pot. Did the Spanish intellect wither because the Inquisition wrapped it in over-tight swaddling-clothes? or did the Spaniard first create and then submit to this repressive institution because he had little tendency to speculation? To judge by what went before and by what has come after the Inquisition, the second reading of the riddle is at least as plausible as the first. However that may be, it is difficult to see how the Inquisition is to be made responsible for the carelessness of form and the loquacious commonplace, which are the main defects of Spanish prose and verse, while it may fairly claim to have helped to preserve Spanish literature from one grave fault so visible in parts of our own. The Holy Office, which allowed Lope de Vega to write La Esclava de su Galan, would not have punished him for writing an As You Like It. Since it suffered Cervantes to create Don Quixote, it would not have

burnt the author of a Novela de Picaros, who had made his hero as real as Gil Blas. The Inquisition was no more responsible for the hasty writing of Lope than for his undue complacence towards the vices of his patron the Duke of Sessa. A literature which could produce La Vida es Sueño, El Condenado por Desconfiado, and the Mágico Prodigioso, had all the freedom necessary to say the profoundest things on man's passions and nature in the noblest style. It was his own too great readiness to say "This will do," and not the Inquisition, which prevented Tirso de Molina from making La Venganza de Tamar as perfect in form all through as it is in one scene. The Church had no quarrel with perfection of form. It had, indeed, a quarrel with mere grossness of expression, and would certainly have frowned on many so-called comic scenes of our own Elizabethan plays. This was a commendable fastidiousness of taste not peculiar to the Spanish Church. The Spaniard may not be always moral, but he has seldom been foul-mouthed. In this, as in other respects, the Church spoke for the nation; but it was the effective administrative instrument which could coerce an offending minority into decency-and that we may surely count to it for righteousness.

30

CHAPTER II.

THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS.

THE STARTING

POINT OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL -THE NATURAL INFLUENCE OF ITALY PREVALENCE OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL- -ITS ARISTOCRATIC SPIRIT-WHAT WAS IMITATED FROM THE ITALIANSITS TECHNIQUE AND MATTER-ARTIFICIALITY OF THE WORK OF THE SCHOOL BOSCAN -GARCILASO-THEIR IMMEDIATE FOLLOWERSTHE SCHOOLS OF SALAMANCA AND SEVILLE-GÓNGORA AND GÓNGORISM THE EPICS-THE 'ARAUCANA'-THE 'LUSIADS.'

The starting

MR TICKNOR has made the very just remark, that the manner of the introduction of the later Italian influence into Spanish poetry enables us to point of the see for once in a way exactly, when and classic school. at whose instigation a literary revolution was begun. The story is told by the best possible authority, by Juan Boscan, who was one of the leaders of the movement, in the long letter to the Duchess. of Soma, which is printed as a preface to the second book of the collected works of himself and his friend Garcilaso de la Vega, published at Barcelona in 1543.1 En (to give him his native title) Juan Boscan

1 I have used the first edition of Boscan, Barcelona, 1543, but have seen mention of a modern reprint by William J. Knapp, Madrid, 1875.

Almogaver was a Catalan of a noble family and of good estate. The date of his birth is uncertain, but it probably fell in the last years of the fifteenth century. He died in 1540 at Perpignan, where he had gone in discharge of his duty as ayo, or tutor, to that formidable person the great Duke of Alva. The story has been often told, but must needs be repeated in every history of Spanish literature. Boscan, who had already written verse in the old forms of the previous century, was a cultivated gentleman who had served in Italy, and had there acquired a good knowledge of the language. This he afterwards turned to account in a translation of Castiglione's Courtier, which was considered by the Spaniards as not inferior to the original, and had great popularity. In 1526 he attended the Court at Granada, and there met Andrea Navagiero the Venetian ambassador. Navagiero urged him to write "in the Italian manner." Boscan turned the advice over in his mind during his long ride back to Barcelona, and finally decided to act on it, though not without doubts, and not until he had been encouraged by a friend. This was the far more famous Garcia Laso de la Vega, whose names, according to a not uncommon custom, were combined into Garcilaso.1 He was born in 1503 of a very ancient house of nobles of Toledo, and was killed by being hurled from a ladder while leading a storming-party at Frèjus in 1536. Little is known of their friendship, and indeed it would seem that

1 Tesoro del Parnaso Español of Quintana, 41-51. Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra, vol. xxxii.