he was telling a feigned tale, upon which she recognised him, and let him in joyfully. The stone still remains where it fell; it is used as a weight upon the harrow of the farm, and if it be removed from the estate, it is always brought back, no person knows how. Another tradition says, that he supplied Plymouth with water by art magic; he rode thither from Dartmoor, and a stream of water followed his horse's heels. In this manner the skill in hydraulics, which on that occasion he actually displayed, is represented; and by a less pardonable perversion he is said to have delivered England from the Spanish Armada, not by his courage and seamanship, but by taking a piece of wood and cutting it in pieces over the side of his own vessel, when every chip became a man of war as it fell into the sea. How gladly would 'Lope have believed this also if he had happened to hear it, and how satisfactorily would it have served to account for the disgrace and disaster which befell the Invincible Fleet! But thus has this great navigator shared the fate of Virgil, Friar Bacon, and Pope Sylvester, in being converted into a magician! In addition to that national hatred which Drake had well deserved of the Spaniards, Lope de Vega perhaps bore towards him a personal ill-will, as one main cause of the sufferings which he had undergone in the Armada, and which, as Lord Holland observes, he seems never totally to have forgotten. The tyranny, the cruelty, and, above all, the heresy of Queen Elizabeth, are the perpetual objects of his poetical invective.' On a former occasion, we have shown in what manner this Queen was represented to the Catholic world by Catholic writers. Lope no doubt believed that she had substituted her own name in the Liturgy in place of the Virgin's, and that under her laws the daughters of Catholic families were condemned to public prostitution. In this light Gongora regarded her when he thus addressed England: O once the Catholic and powerful Isle Who for the sceptre and the sword might take ; * Vol. VI. p. 536. On the Sparish and Portugueze Inquisitions, She She-wolf libidinous and fierce for blood, Thou strumpet-offspring of the adulterous bed, Its fiery wrath, and blast thy impious head!* Little were these writers able to appreciate the character of Elizabeth, or understand with what just gratitude her reign would be remembered in England. In a ridiculous sort of sonnet which has been ascribed to Gongora and to Cervantes, Lope is advised to cancel his Dragontea, burn his Angelica, and not finish his Jerusalem, for Jerusalem was already miserable enough. This was resented by one of Lope's friends in a dirty reply; and Lope himself, in the motto to his Jerusalem, implies that an unfavourable prepossession had gone forth against this which he probably conceived to be the most important of his works. Legant prius et postea despiciant, ne videantur non ex judicio sed ex odii præsumptione ignorata damnare. The author calls the work a Tragic Epopeya, and styles himself in the title-page, as an honourable designation, Familiar of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Advantage was taken of his absence when the book was printed to insert his portrait and eulogy from a book of portraits composed in Seville by Francisco Pacheco, accompanied however with an advertisement that it is not the portrait which Francisco Pacheco made, a notice very needful to the artist's reputation. His collection is said by Nicholas Antonio to have been bequeathed to the Conde de Olivares, and to exist, if it were still in existence, among the wreck of that minister's library. We know not whether it be from this, or from what other original, that the fine countenance in Lord Holland's work has been engraved; its character is very different from that in the Parnasso Español, which bears more resemblance to the wretched performance prefixed to the Jerusalem. A living Portugueze poet, who has drawn upon himself a torrent of indignation for exposing the absurdities of the Lusiad, and detecting the numberless imitations of which it is composed, speaks in one of his critical prefaces, of the frozen and hyperborean Jerusalem of Lope de Vega. That it is a failure is generally acknowledged, though Marini, in his funeral eulogium upon the poet, audaciously prefers it to the work of Tasso: but the Portugueze critic could not have characterized it by any epithets more inappropriate. There is warmth enough in the composition; in this, indeed, Lope has seldom been deficient, his fault is that he never gives himself time to cool, but when his thoughts fly off like sparks from the anvil is contented because they shine. Joze Agostinho de Macedo is not so well read in Castillian as he is in Italian literature, or he would not have complained of what he calls the invincible infecundity of the Spaniards in epic poetry; they have been as prolific as their neighbours in works of mediocrity. This writer probably despised the Jerusalem too much to read it. Few persons perhaps in the present generation have perused it: its length, for it contains about five and twenty thousand lines, may well have deterred them; even Lord Holland dismisses it with a mere assertion that the poet has failed in his ambitious attempt. A failure indeed it is, and a total one; the plan, when compared to that of the Angelica, is as confusion worse confounded; it has neither beginning, middle, nor end; neither method, nor purpose, nor proportion, and many of the parts might be extirpated, or, what is more extraordinary, might change places, without any injury to the whole. But there is more vigour of thought in it, and more felicity of expression than in any other of his long poems. The subject is that crusade of which Richard Coeur de Lion was the hero; but as the Castillians bore a part in it, they, of course, are preferred to the place of honour by their countryman. In the first book there is an incident like a very remarkable one in the Castle of Otranto: the picture of Norandine stalks from its pannel, and addresses Saladine:-the resemblance may be merely accidental, but if Horace Walpole had looked at the beginning of the poem, it is the first thing which he would have found there. In the third book the apostate Count of Tripoli, a man infamous in the history of the crusades, is killed by a night-mare. This passage may be quoted to exemplify the occasional oddity of Lope's manner. Two kind of dreams there be; of softest down The gentle one is framed, the sterner kind Of lead, beneath whose painful weight the breast Το escape from that incumbent load of lead. The throttling spectre pins him to the bed, In vain he seeks to wrestle with the weight Nor hath he tongue to speak, nor heart to pray; Through the wide open mouth Death makes his way; They know not which is out, nor which is in.* The fourth book opens with a flight of fancy not less extraordinary. Jerusalem stands up before the throne of God, and relates, in eight and twenty stanzas, the history of the Jews from the time when the Lord brought them out of Egypt, and gave ears to the stone walls of Jericho,' down to their present captivity under Saladine. The effect which this appeal produced in heaven is described by the poet in a manner which he supposed to be sublime, and which, beyond a doubt, accorded with his notions of religious poetry: it could not be given in English without giving just offence to the wiser and holier feelings of a protestant people. In this poem, as well as in the Angelica, Lope has introduced some Latin rhymes, and here also they are in the form of an in*cription. 'Hoc jacet in sarcophago Rex ille Telo, tam magna affectus fuit insania, Abhorreant omnes, nomine et remoto Dos sueños ay, el blando està com- De plumas de aves; y el cruel vestido Que quieras? dize, y tiembla, y se levanta Ya le pone el mano a la garganta, Ya sacando la lengua al trance fuerte Con los abiertos bracos remediarse; Hablar quiere, no ay lengua, el peso excede, Ni el puede buyr, ni el sueño aligerarse: La muerte quiere per la boca entrarse, Better Latin rhymes were written by Dona Bernerda Ferreira, a noble Portugueze lady, contemporary with Lope: the best serious specimen of Latin in modern metre is Sir Francis Kinaston's Amores Troili et Creseidæ, a translation of the first two books of Chaucer's poem; but it was reserved for famous Barnaby to employ the barbarous ornament of rhyme so as to give thereby point and character to good latinity. At the end of the poem Lope complains bitterly of his fortune, and the language of his complaint is such that it seems more reasonable to suspect his biographers have concealed some circumstances of his life, than to condemn him for indulging in querulous and groundless discontent. He speaks of himself not only as ruined and neglected, and struggling with domestic embarrassments, but as a banished man, and in that circumstance alone resembling* Ovid. It may be too late, perhaps, to hope for any other illustration of Lope's private history than can be discovered in his works and certainly the inquiry would be prosecuted with much less probability of success in any other country than his own, but it is evident that very little pains have as yet been bestowed by his countrymen upon the life of this remarkable man. The sonnet in which Lope was exhorted not to proceed with his Jerusalem seems to have been imputed to Cervantes by Lope or his admirers, rather from jealousy and vague suspicion, than on any satisfactory grounds. Cervantes was too great and therefore too equitable a man, to depreciate a successful rival; and he acknowledged Lope's merits though he perceived his faults, and was conscious of his own immeasurable superiority To those indeed who love and honour the memory of Cervantes, the fact that a complimentary sonnet of his is prefixed to the Dragontea will be a decisive proof that he could never afterwards have satirized that poem. He has also complimented Lope de Vega, in brief but strong terms, in his Viage del Parnaso. But the Portugueze satirist, Diogo de Sousa, who has likewise written a Journey to Parnassus, under the fictitious name of Diogo Camacho, treats Lope in a very different manner. The poet describes himself as having arrived at Madrid his way from Lisbon. on Yo siempre de la embidia perseguido, rado: De sola mi verdad favorecido, Y del mortal poder desengañado, Si à cuydados domesticos atiende De todo bien desamparada pluma, Yo me disculpo y el poder me entiende: Pero por ver lo que la piedra ofende, Passen los tiempos, y serà estimada, Two |