Imatges de pàgina
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of the Liberal Arts, where in virtuous employment he would learn to forget Belisarda. Here the author takes up one of the tritest allegories of the sixteenth century. The fair damsel, Lady Grammar, receives him in her saloon and recites to him a poem on the art over which she presides; Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, and Geometry do the same; the latter lady has a fair daughter named Perspective. Music entertains him with a song to her viol, Astrology with a sonnet, and Poetry sings her own praises to the harp. The end of all this is, that he is now fully prepared to mount the hill and arrive at the Temple of Desengaño, an allegorical personage who is a great favourite among the peninsular poets and preachers, but for whom our language affords no name.

Among the commendatory verses prefixed to the Arcadia is a sonnet written in the character of Anfriso, addressed to Lope de Vega, calling him in the sonnet by the name which he had given himself in the romance, and acknowledging that the book contains the history of his own love. The first two lines imply that he was a powerful man who had taken Lope under his protection.

Belardo que a mi tierra ayays venido,

Y a ser uno tambien de mis pastores.

In the romance itself Anfriso is called noble; and a sonnet upon the death of his mother distinctly marks him for one of the Alva family. The painter Francisco Pacheco, in the eulogy which accompanies his portrait of Lope de Vega, says, that in the Arcadia the author had succeeded in what he designed, which was to record a real story according to the pleasure of the parties.'-Now the Diana of George of Montemayor is written precisely upon the same subject as the Arcadia, it is the story of a lover desengañado, reconciling himself to the loss of his mistress, and drinking forgetfulness of his passion from the fountain of the Sage Felicia. The French translator of this work says it was believed in Spain to contain the private history of the Duke of Alva, in whose service George of Montemayor had lived. These are curious circumstances, and the assertion that the Arcadia was written by the Duke of Alva's desire, and the certain fact that Lope de Vega was at one time in his service, strongly support the inference to which they lead. That Alva, the bloody and inexorable Alva, should in his old age delight in having the loves of his youth recorded in pastoral strains, and choose to be described as a love-lorn shepherd, tending flocks and singing madrigals, seems more out of nature than any thing in Arcadiau romance. More fitly was he represented by the statue which he set up at Antwerp, an armed and brazen image, trampling upon heresy and rebellion; in other words-upon religion and liberty! Yet it is difficult to

resist the evidence which has here been collected; and perhaps the inconsistency is not in truth so great as it appears. Strength of feeling will generally be found to co-exist with strength of character; or rather it is by the perfect subjection and controul of strong feelings, that a strong character is formed and manifested. Alva was born in inauspicious times, and the circumstances of his rank and country were such that he was called upon to bear in them a most conspicuous and cruel part: but he had qualities which, under other circumstances, might have given him a place, not only with statesmen and generals, but among the most heroic names of history. No common frame of mind, and no ordinary foresight were evinced in his remark, that Don Quixote would be the ruin of Spain. It is likely that such a man might remember the conquest over his own affections in early life as the most difficult victory he had ever obtained; and it is not impossible that one too conversant with inquisitions, scaffolds, saccages, and scenes of blood, when he had leisure for literature should delight in the representation of scenes, and manners, and pursuits the most opposite to those in which he was conscientiously but unhappily engaged. And here a memorable fact in the history of this personage may be mentioned. During the last few weeks of his life Alva received no other sustenance than from the breast of a woman, Alva who had made so many a woman childless, and under whose remorseless orders so many babes and mothers had been involved in undistinguishing destruction! A more deplorable picture of human infirmity cannot be conceived, nor a more impressive one to those who are acquainted with the character of the Low Country wars.

The censure which Lord Holland passes upon the conduct of the Arcadia is not altogether accurate-there is no foundation for his remark that the shepherds occasionally talk theology; neither are the discussions upon the liberal sciences and the epitaphs of the Spanish generals placed in their mouths, as his language would imply. But the opinion which he expresses of the work is discriminating and just, and in the spirit of a liberal and ingenuous mind, better pleased when it can bestow praise than when it must award The following verses, which his lordship has given as no unfavourable specimen of the poetical part of the book, exhibit a fair one of his own extraordinary skill in translation.

censure.

1.

In the green season of my flowering years,
I liv'd, O Love! a captive in thy chains;
Sang of delusive hopes and idle fears,
And wept thy follies in my wisest strains :
Sad sport of time when under thy controul,
So wild was grown my wit, so blind my soul.

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But from the yoke which once my courage tam'd
I, undeceived, at length have slipp'd my head,

And in that sun whose rays my soul enflam'd,
What scraps I rescued at my ease I spread.
So shall I altars to Indifference* raise,

And chaunt without alarm returning freedom's praise.

3.

So on their chains the ransom'd captives dwell;
So carrols one who cured relates his wound ;

So slaves of masters, troops of battle tell,

As I my cheerful liberty resound.

Freed, sea and burning fire, from thy controul,
Prison, wound, war, and tyrant of my soul.

4.

'Remain then, faithless friend, thy arts to try
On such as court alternate joy and pain;
For me, I dare her very eyes defy,

I scorn the amorous snare, the pleasing chain,
That held enthrall'd my cheated heart so long,

And charm'd my erring soul unconscious of its wrong.'t

The next of Lope's works in order of time appears to have been La Hermosura de Angelica. What the house of Oedipus and the tale of Troy divine were to the Greeks, the Round Table and the Paladins of France were for many centuries to European literature. The French romancers preferred the British story, and the Italians the French one, whence it happened that, owing to the different characters of the two languages, the greater part of the Round Table romances are in prose, while the Twelve Peers have more frequently been celebrated in verse. Boiardo opened a new vein

*There is no word in our language for desengaño.' ↑ La verde primavera

De mis floridos años

Pasé cautivo, amor, en tus prisiones,
Y en la cadena fiera

Cantando mis engaños,
Lloré con mi razon tus sinrazones;
Amargas confusiones
Del tiempo, que ha tenido
Ciega mi alma, y loco mi sentido!

Mas ya que el fiero yugo
Que mi cerviz domaba,
Desata el desengaño con tu afrenta,
Y al mismo sol enjugo,
Que un tiempo me abrasaba,
La ropa que saqué de la tormenta,
Con voz libre y esenta
Al desengaño santo

Consagro altares, y alabanzas canto.

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Quanto contento encierra
Contar su herida el sano,

Y en la patria su carcel el cautivo,
Entre la paz la guerra,

Y el libre del tyrano;

Tanto en cantar mi libertad recibo.
O mar! O fuego vivo!

Que fuiste al alma mia

Herida, carcel, guerra, y tyrania.

"Quedate, falso amigo,
Para engañar aquellos

Que siempre estan contentos y quejosos;
Que desde aqui maldigo

Los mismos ojos bellos,
Y aquellos lazos dulces y amorosos
Que un tiempo tan hermosos
Tuvieron, aunque injusto,
Asida el alma y engañado el gusto,'

in this prolific mine; and the success of Ariosto in pursuing it, instead of deterring others, as it ought to have done, from following a poet whom in his own way it was not possible to surpass, made the rhymers of Italy fall to work with redoubled alacrity,-some score of continuations in Italian might be enumerated, and this was only one of the channels into which this great stream of romance was now divided. The Italians had as little interest in Charlemagne as the French in Arthur; but there was a portion of his history which regarded Spain, and which the Spaniards could not but remember with pride. Roncesvalles

that fatal field

'La dove il corno sonò tanto forte

Dopo la dolorosa rotta,'-PULCI.

'Where Charlemagne with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabia',-

afforded a theme upon which the Spanish poets delighted to dwell, even as much as upon their victories over the Moors. How popular the ballads and metrical romances upon this subject were in the golden age of Spain, appears from Don Quixote; and among the poems of greater extent, not fewer than six continuations of the Orlando were produced. One of those is the España Defendida, of Christoval Suarez de Figueroa, better known as one of the latest Spanish writers upon American history, but of little merit either as a poet or historian. The work of D. Jeronimo de Urrea is known to collectors merely for its exceeding rarity-being, in truth, as worthless as it is rare. That of Augustin Alonso is still rarer; and has escaped the notice even of Nicolas Antonio. Cervantes has extolled the Lagrimas de Angelica of Luis Barahona de Soto ;Cervantes never was base enough to censure a book because it was written by an enemy, but he has oftentimes committed the more venial injustice of praising one because it was written by a friend. We have never had an opportunity of examining whether his approbation is as ill bestowed here, as it is upon the other works which he commends at the same time, and in the same manner. Lord Holland says this poem has always been esteemed one of the best in the Spanish language. The Bernardo of Bernardo de Balbuena has been more fortunate; after having remained, like the others which have been mentioned, unnoticed and almost unknown, from the time of its publication in 1624, it was re-edited in 1808, by Quintana, well known as one of the best living poets of his country, and better to be remembered hereafter as the author of the most eloquent papers which appeared during the glorious struggle of his countrymen against the French. Balbuena's poem is strongly marked by the characteristic faults of his age and country, but he

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well knew what an heroic poem ought to be; and has described* with great force and spirit the qualities with which a writer who undertakes so arduous a task ought to be endowed: among other points, he insists upon the necessity of forming a careful and coherent plan. This part of a poet's business, Lope de Vega seems never to have taken into consideration. He wrote his Angelica, not indeed like Sir Richard Blackmore, to the rumbling of his chariot wheels,' but to the rattling of cordage and the flapping of sails, the roaring of the winds, and the voice of the stormy sea:it was begun and finished on board the Armada, the general and himself, he says, completing their enterprizes at the same time;he might have added, with equal ill success,-for Lope throughout the work seems as little to have seen the way before him, as the general, when the tempests and the victorious English drove his scattered fleet into the German ocean.

It would be wasting time to analyze a poem like this, where the parts have as little beauty in themselves, as connexion with each other; and the whole is without regularity, order, purport or interest of any kind. The Beauty of Angelica gives name to it, because a certain king of Seville, who dies for grief when his wife has died of the same passion upon marrying him, bequeaths his kingdom to that person, whether man or woman, who should be pronounced by seven royal judges superior to every other candidate in personal charms. The stir which such a legacy excites in the female world, is described with much liveliness; and the grave arguments of the judges are not ill represented.

One grave old judge affirmed it was their place,
The unerring laws of beauty to define,
And if the form accorded with the face,

As sculptors try their work by rule and line;
And as from right proportion natural grace
Is the result, he therefore must opine
Concerning Thisbe's claim, that they should see
If all were in due scale and just degree.
Another sage one thought the counsel sound,
For beauty is the symmetry of parts,

And in this symmetry when all are bound

There is the magnet which attracts all hearts;
The separate charm which then in each is found,
Harmonious union to the whole imparts,
And Beauty therefore bears, when these
The names of concord and of harmony.

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agree,

* Vol. I. Book III. p. 161.

O dotards,

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