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In all our prayers the Almighty does regard
The judgement of the balance, not the yard:
He loves not words, but matter: 'tis his pleasure

To buy his wares by weight and not by measure.'

In the balance, the works of Mariner and Macedo have been both found wanting, and the breath of time has scattered them like chaff. Those of their more fortunate contemporary will presently be weighed for the reader's satisfaction; and with regard to the quantity it may be observed, that a complete edition of his writings would not much, if at all, exceed those of Voltaire, who, in labour of composition, for he sent nothing into the world carelessly, must have greatly exceeded Lope. And the labours of all these meu shrink into insignificance when compared to those of some of the schoolmen and of the Fathers.

Other writers of the same age obtained a wider celebrity; Don Quixote, during the life of its ill-requited author, was naturalized in countries where the name of Lope de Vega was not known, and Du Bartas was translated into the language of every reading people. But no writer ever enjoyed such a full share of popularity.

⚫ Cardinal Barberini,' says the noble biographer, followed him with veneration in the streets; the king would stop to gaze at such a prodigy; the people crowded round him wherever he appeared; the learned and the studious thronged to Madrid from every part of Spain to see this phoenix of their country, this "monster of literature;" and even Italians, no extravagant admirers in general of poetry that is not their own, made pilgrimages from their country for the sole purpose of conversing with Lope. So associated was the idea of excellence with his name, that it grew in common conversation to signify any thing perfect in its kind; and a Lope diamond, a Lope day, or a Lope woman, became fashionable and familiar modes of expresing their good qualities.'-vol. i. pp. 85, 86.

His poetry is said to have been as advantageous to his fortune as to his fame. Montalvan estimates the profits which he derived from his dramatic works at not less than eighty thousand ducats, and it is affirmed that he received presents from individuals to the amount of ten thousand five hundred more. Yet he is charged with complaining most unreasonably' of neglect, ill-usage, and poverty. Who,' says Lord Holland, could read without surprize his letter to his son, dissuading him from the study of poetry as unprofitable, and, in confirmation of his precepts, lamenting his own calamities, in a strain more suited to the circumstances of Camoens and Cervantes than to the idol of the public and favourite of princes!" The complaint of neglect was certainly preposterous; but may there not be reason for suspecting that the account of his gains has been as greatly exaggerated as that of his writings and is not his own authority upon this point more to be relied upon

than

than that of an eulogist who seems to consider the quantity of his works and the amount of his profits as the criterion of his merit? Of how little importance now is the question either to Lope de Vega, or to the world! The permament rank which impartial time has assigned him in literature is a more interesting topic of inquiry, and may best be estimated from a review of some of his works:we say some, because it may be safely asserted that no living person has read them all; and perhaps the number which we have gone through may be carried to the account of supererogatory labour and mis-spent time.

Lord Holland has been led to dwell upon the Arcadia longer, he says, perhaps, than its merits appear to justify, because it furnishes striking instances of the defects and of the beauties of Lope's style, and because the author himself seems to have been singularly partial to it. He is said to have written it at the instance of the Duke of Alva, which seems to imply that the subject was prescribed. Pastoral romance had been made fashionable by Sannazaro, and still more so (in Spain) by George de Montemayor; when Alva, therefore, took Lope under his patronage, he might probably have advised him to try his strength in competition with these successful authors. The work of Sannazaro has been considered as his model, and Spanish critics pronounce the imitation to be decidedly superior to the original; but it is difficult to conceive how they should imagine it to be an imitation, there being no other resemblance than the identity of name, and the intermixture of poetry with prose. The Arcadia of Sannazaro is purely pastoral, and has as little fable as one of the eclogues of Virgil; it consists, indeed, of several eclogues, connected with no great art by interludes of prose, in which two or three stories are told of love and lamentation, almost all devoid of incident, and none of them leading to any end: we have sheep and goats, lambs and kidlings, carved bowls and oaten pipes, crooks and garlands, the loves and the doves, dark pines, tall cypresses and shadowy chesnuts, cool groves and mossy caves, and murmuring streams, as soothing and as soporific as the mellifluous language in which they are described. The author introduces himself by his own name, and by that of Sincero which he had adopted, and he concludes the work by travelling from Arcadia through the caverns of the Nymph under ground and under the sea, till he emerges in his own country and finds some shepherds of his acquaintance singing there in the same manner as the shepherds whom he had left in Greece.

It is related of Vauquelin des Yvetaux, that having lost his employ at court, resigned his abbey of la Trappe, and retired to enjoy an epicurean life according to his heart's desire, he became somewhat deranged in mind as well as in morals, and his insanity

took

took a pastoral turn: so by the aid of strong fancy, converting his garden in the Fauxbourg Saint Germain into one of the vallies of Arcadia, he dressed himself like a shepherd of romance, and with a straw hat lined with rose-coloured satin, a scrip by his side, and a crook in his hand, he drove his imaginary flocks up and down the regular walks and allies of the garden, protecting them from the wolf, while his mistress, Mlle. Dupuis, who had been a street musician, paraded by his side in the same costume, and played the harp to the pastoral verses which he sang.-A French courtier and debauchee would seem one of the last persons to be possessed by the spirit of Arcadian romance. Had there not, however, been some powerful charm in pastoral composition, it could not have maintained its popularity from the time of Theocritus downward; and it is easy to discover wherein this charm consists. Whatever advantage there may be in the society and the accommodation which large towns afford, the taste for a town life is formed by habit and calculation, not by nature: children who are born in cities pant for the country as the hart for the waterbrooks; and the eagerness with which all who can gratify this natural desire fly in the summer to green fields, the fresh air and the open sky, evinces that even in maturer life the instinct is not extinguished. In those regions where pastoral composition originated, this instinct is not stronger than in our own less genial climate, but it exists perhaps more continually; for where shelter is far more frequently required from the sun than from bleak winds or rain, there is no season wherein natural scenery ceases to be delightful for recollection or for hope. The creaking of the nora or water wheel by which the gardens of Spain are irrigated, and which in itself is not more agreeable than the creaking of any other wheel, is enumerated by the people among the delights of the country, because its sound is associated in their minds with water and freshness and verdure. How willingly then would such a people resign themselves to waking dreams of groves, meadows, fountains and running brooks ;-and it is little more than a dream that pastorals in general excite, so even is their strain, and so little the demand which they make upon the intellectual faculties.

The Spaniards received this mode of composition from Italy, and immediately set upon it their own characteristic stamp. George of Montemayor introduced a greater variety of poems, more reasoning, more passion, a more connected story, and the aid of magic: in choice of diction he was not inferior to Sannazaro, and in method and materials the advantage was on his side. Lope de Vega was a younger as well as a more aspiring writer when he wrote his Arcadia,-it has therefore the faults of youth, a stilted style, an amplification of thought, and an elaborate display of the

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common-places of a school-boy's learning; but in the style there is often felicity as well as force, and in the amplification a redundant ingenuity is manifested. Human feelings also are delineated with truth as well as power and passion; and although the meagreness of its fable might make it appear insipid and tedious to a hasty, an idle, or a presumptuous critic, he who should be in a state of mind and knowledge to appreciate it fairly, let him open the volume where he might, would feel himself engaged with no ordinary writer, and would not readily lay it down from weariness. Lord Holland observes that the abstract of a work of this nature (for it must be considered as a poem) forms a very unfair criterion of its merit.' To a certain extent this is true; the execution both in poetry and painting being of such importance that, if this fails, it matters little what may have been the design. It is true also that no criterion of a work can be so unfair as an ignorant or malicious abstract of its contents,--a secret so well understood that it is one of the commonest practices of impudent malignity. But even in pictures the conception is that part and that alone which can be communicated by words, which displays the mind of the painter and which can be made immortal, when all that is mechanical and material has perished: in this it was that Timanthes excelled Raffaello, and therefore he will outlive him. So in works of fine literature, although it be certain that an abstract can no more represent the beauties of composition, than the description of a picture can convey a sensation of its colouring and effect, yet a fair summary enables the reader to understand in what spirit it is conceived, and to judge at least of the ground plan.

The fable of Lope de Vega's Arcadia is meagre, as we have already hinted; it may however be abstracted in a few lines, which will not be misemployed if there should appear reason for supposing that it is connected with a curious fact in Spanish literature. Anfriso, a young shepherd of such noble extraction that he believes Jupiter to have been his grandfather, loves and is beloved by Belisarda; but the parents of the damsel are in treaty for marrying her to Salicio, who was 'as rich as he was ignorant, as presumptuous as he was rich, as bold as he was unpolished, and as fortunate as he was unworthy.' The artful suggestion of some of his rivals induces Anfriso's parents to send him with his flocks to a distant pasture,-Belisarda's father is called by business in the same direction, and takes his daughter with him; the lovers renew their meetings, and scandalous tongues are so busy upon the subject that she at length beseeches him to absent himself a while, for the sake of both. Accordingly he sets out for Italy, not as a shepherd, but as a traveller. Here he loses his way at night among the mountains, and comes to the cavern of a certain magician by name

Dardanio,

Dardanio, who bids him ask any thing which he desires, and promises to gratify him in it, however impossible it may be. It might have been supposed that his first thought would have been to ask Belisarda for a wife;-this, however, would have spoiled the story, and poor Anfriso was not more fortunate in his use of this fair opportunity, than the woman in the well known tale of the Three Wishes. He only desired to see the object of his love. Dardanio accordingly raised a spirit, who took them up in a whirlwind, carried them so high that they came near the Gemini, and after giving them a bird's-eye view of Europe, Africa, and Asia, set them down safely upon Mount Cyllene. Here the magician transforms himself into a lean pony, and takes Anfriso, in the form of a decrepid old woodman, upon his back; thus disguised they approached Belisarda, who, somewhat oddly, is generally described as driving ducks instead of sheep. They come near enough to see her in conversation with a certain Olympio, one of her numerous admirers, but not to hear what passes;-the shepherd does not pretend to entertain any hope of winning her affections, but entreats her so earnestly to give him a black ribband in exchange for a carved spoon,-that in evil hour she consents; Anfriso, seeing this and hearing nothing, would fain have put her to death for her seeming perfidy; but Dardanio, who for a sage and a friend had acted alike unwisely in both characters, carries him back in the whirlwind as fast as they came, and then disappears, leaving him in his error and in the misery which it occasions, to wander where he will. After travelling till he comes to the sea shore, he there finds some one with letters from his parents; these letters induce him to return home, and there, by the advice of a friend, he pays court to Anarda, in order to revenge himself upon Belisarda, by making her jealous. Unconscious of having deserved such treatment, Belisarda resents it in the same spirit, and affects to favour Olympio in Anfriso's sight. They succeed in acting their parts perfectly, and in making each other miserable; and in this state of mind Belisarda desperately marries Salicio. Soon afterwards she meets Anfriso, and an explanation takes place when it is too late. Anfriso, who had at first become well nigh as furious as Orlando, is persuaded by some of his friends to apply for relief to the Sage Polinesta, who can cure him of his love. To her accordingly he goes, and she tells him that in such cases remedy is not impossible where it is truly desired;he must strip himself of whatever he had worn till that time, and put on fresh garments, and be bathed in various waters, and with various perfumes rid himself of the odours of his old imaginations. When this was done, his cure was to be completed by a visit to the temple

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