Imatges de pàgina
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The prizes in the sixth contest were for painted hieroglyphics, emblematic of any of Isidro's miracles or excellencies. Terpsichore was the lady patroness of this department, though she might with more propriety have inspected a trial in dancing; the rewards were, a golden girdle, worth three hundred reals; a silver apple of two hundred; and an article of dress, which we are not sufficiently skilful in the vocabulary of the wardrobe to understand, further than that it appertained to the doublet, and that the material was black silk, un corte de jubon de tirela negra de cien reales. The seventh subject was a ballad in which four natives of Madrid were to be celebrated, Pope Damasus, Pope Melchiades, Isidro, and his reigning Majesty, Philip III. the prescribed length was forty verses, and the prizes, a belt of gold enamel worth twenty crowns; a cup of silver gilt worth a hundred and fifty reals; and six ells of green satin-a winning poet, in his green satin, his embroidered girdle, his pearl-colour stockings, and his white garters with gold open-work, must have been as fine as the fore-horse in a team. This was Euterpe's prize. Polyhymnia proposed the eighth; a little boat of silver gilt worth twenty crowns; a trinket (brinco) of silver gilt and enamelled, worth a hundred and fifty reals; and a writing stand of ebony and ivory, valued at an hundred. The last prizes were, three purses perfumed with amber, and containing the one fifteen crowns, the second ten, and the third six; proposed by Urania for glosing the following lines :—

"Es bien Isidro que holgando

Esteys en el campo vos,

Y los Angeles de Dios

Esten por vos trabaxando?'

'While you take your ease in the field

Is it seemly Isidro, I ask,

That the Angels of God

Should be doing your task?

These were to be burlesque verses, but in that strain of modest and decorous merriment which the subject, the place, and the day required.

The place was the parochial church of St. Andres, where Isidro had attended mass every day during the latter years of his life, and into which he had been translated forty years after his death when he did not choose to lie any longer in the church-yard. The church was hung with the richest tapestries from the royal palaces. The altars were drest with ornaments of dead silver offered by the merchants of Madrid; and in the middle of the capella mayor, or great chapel, was the body of the beatified Isidro in a silver shrine, placed upon the plough on which it had been carried in procession the day of his beatification; the shrine was given by the silversmiths of the city,

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and vied in value and in workmanship with the most splendid pieces of its kind. In the church-yard, and near that part of it where Isidro had been interred till he became too great a personage to lie out of doors, a temporary building was constructed, connected with the church. Here were the benches and table of the judges, arranged as in a tribunal, and furnished in the richest manner; opposite the judges were a seat and table for the person who read the verses; and on one side the prizes were suspended by pearl-colour strings over a cloth of crimson velvet fringed with gold. A festival so characteristic of the age and country deserves to be thus minutely described. When the audience had assembled, consisting, as we are told, of lords, religioners, lawyers, humanists, ladies, and common people; forming altogether as cheerful a spectacle as a spring garden with its variety of flowers,' Lope de Vega took the speaker's chair, and after a prelude of music, began the sports of the day by reading a string of ridiculous advertisements, soliciting alms for the poets in the hospital, who were very numerous and in extreme necessity,-for a poet, who had lost the use of his hands by biting his nails, for a poetess who could not attend mass for want of a mantle, and other such easy jests upon the trite subjects of poetry and poverty: when this is compared with the privileges, ordinances, and notices sent by Apollo to the Spanish poets, in Cervantes's Viage del Parnaso, the comparison is very much to Lope's disadvantage. He then recited about eight hundred lines of his own in honour of Isidro by way of prelude; after which he read the regulations of the contest, and finally exercised his indefatigable lungs in reading all the poems which were given in; these he published in one volume with the title of Justa Poetica, and it forms part of the collection of his Miscellaneous Works.

Among the persons who wrote for these prizes were Francisco Lopez de Zarate, D. Juan de Jauregui, the Conde de Villamediana, Vicente Espinel, D. Antonio de Mendoza, Alonso de Ledesma, Anastasio Pantaleon, Miguel Sylveira, Montalvan the dramatist, and others whose names are still well known. The last poem in every contest was read as the production of Master Burguillos; according to one of the regulations no person could receive a prize if he had written under a feigned name; all the pieces of this personage were burlesque, and as he did not appear to claim the prize for any of them, it is expressly stated in this publication that, according to the general opinion, it was a character introduced by Lope himself. The festival was concluded by a vituperative poem in his name, composed upon occasion of an extraordinary prize being awarded to him for having written upon all the nine contests, -this prize was a draft for two hundred crowns upon the banks or Flanders-which are like the banks of Newfoundland; and in his

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OCT. indignation at such treatment he imprecates some extraordinary maledictions upon Lope, if he has been aiding and abetting in the jest. He wishes that he may never reach the top of Parnassus either by a trot or gallop; that in his intercourse with the muses they may be to him like the temptations of St. Anthony; and that instead of having all precious and fashionable things named after him, every thing vile and abominable may be called Lope; such as the worst doses of physic and the vilest implements of the apothecary, diseases and deformities, bad wine, useless relatives, dead dogs and cats, long leagues, the prison, the itch, and the French disease.

This appears to be the first occasion in which the name of Burguillos was brought forward. It was afterwards frequently used on similar occasions, and, in 1634, Lope published a volume under the title of Rimas Humanas y Divinas del Licenciado Tome de Burguillos. From the manner in which this character, is spoken of by Lope in the Justa Poetica, every one would infer that it is a fictitious personage devised by Lope himself for the obvious purpose of giving utterance to lighter and more ludicrous strains than were consistent with his profession and character; and this is confirmed by what Joseph de Valdivielso and Quevedo (both poets themselves and competent judges) say in their official approbation of the Rimas. It is stated still more explicitly in the commendatory verses of D. Garcia de Salcedo Coronel; the verses, it is there said, are written with a feather of the phenix of Spain-the false name may deceive but not the true light, for no artifice can hide that sun for which the whole Castilian world is but a scanty orient; and he puns at the conclusion upon the name of Vega, (which signifies a plain,) according to the custom of Lope's encomiasts. It cannot be supposed that Lope would have printed these verses if such a person as Tomé de Burguillos really had existed; the portrait of the poet therefore which he has prefixed to the collection, and the statement that he had been his school-fellow, and was well known in the Jousts, though he took care not to be seen because he was shabbily drest, are manifestly deceptions of that kind which deceive nobody and in which no deceit is intended. Nevertheless D. Ramon Fernandez, who has reprinted these poems as the eleventh volume of his collection of the Spanish poets, affirms that Burguillos was a real personage, and says that he had written a long dissertation in proof of his existence. This dissertation, we believe, has not been published. D. Ramon Fernandez reprints in his preface, Lope's account of the imaginary author as if it were serious, but he has not reprinted the approbations and the complimentary verses which so plainly affiliate the poems upon Lope himself. Our opinion concurs with that of Lord Holland,

that

that there seems to be no ground for depriving Lope of compositions which his contemporaries, as well as subsequent writers, have all concurred in attributing to him.'

The pieces which Lope de Vega published under this nom de guerre consist of nearly two hundred sonnets, a mock heroic called La Gatomaquia, and a few miscellaneous poems. The sonnets are chiefly satirical, and the satire is mostly directed against what is called the culto, or ornate style, which Gongora had at this time rendered fashionable; sometimes however it is more general. The following specimens will show the character of Lope's raillery;it is very far from exaggerating the folly which it ridicules. The first is entitled an eclogue, neither in imitation of Theocritus, Pomponius, Nemesianus, Bocaccio, nor Calphurnius.

Beneath a rugged rock on whose bald side
The scorching summer let no herbage grow,
Albeit against the sun its lofty pride
Served as a helmet to the vale below,
Sate Damon with his flask and his rebec,

(The flask that he might better bear his part)
And there, his rival in the tuneful art,
Sate Thirsis, with his cedar violin.

Eliso was the judge, whose hand should deck
With poplar wreath the conqueror's honoured brow.
Attentive Zephyr stole the Echoes now,

And up stood Thirsis ready to begin.

Melampus bark'd; the wolf! Antander cried

And till another day the song was laid aside.*

The second is more immediately aimed at Gongora's exaggerating and unexaggerable style.

To a Comb, the poet not knowing whether it was of box or of ivory.
Sail thro' the red waves of the sea of love,
O bark of Barcelona, and between
The billows of those ringlets proudly move,
And now be hidden there, and now be seen!
What golden surges Love, who lurks beneath,
Weaves with the windings of that splendid hair!
Be grateful for thy bliss and leave him there
In joyance, unmolested by thy teeth.
O tusk of elephant, or limb of box,
Gently unravel thou her tangled locks,

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Gently the windings of those curls unfold,
Like the sun's rays in parallels arrange them,
And thro' the labyrinth shape thy paths of gold,
Ere yet to silver envious Time shall change them.*

The third ridicules those descriptions which are sometimes introduced when neither the poet nor the reader can tell why or wherefore.

Down to a valley from the mountain's height
Precipitate the melted ices flow,

There, between shores where fragile fern-tufts grow,
And elms and woodland vines, a sylvan sight,
The chrystal waters sleep; the nymphs delight
Disporting there to bathe their breasts of snow ;-
Sweet ships of love, who plough a narrower main
Than the tall barks that leave the shores of Spain.
A valley, like a vassal, lies below,

Which to supply with sap the floral brood,
Draws from its icy breast at every vein,
Insatiate still, the hoary mountain's blood:
And on this mount, and by this lake so fair,

There happened to me-nothing, I declare.+

Of all Lope's works, Lord Holland tells us his burlesque pieces are those which are most generally admired by his countrymen. The Gatomaquia, he adds, is esteemed the best, and often cited as a model of versification. In this point indeed the author is never deficient but in structure this mock heroic is as faulty as his epic attempts, and we do not recollect any poem of the kind of which the conception is so silly. It is a war between two cats for love of a third one of them rides in full dress upon a monkey to visit her, and each raises an army to fight for her.

For an account of the Corona Tragica we must refer the reader to the work before us, where he will find a masterly translation of one of the best passages in Lope de Vega's writings. Our limits will only permit us to notice, and that briefly, one other of his

* A un peyne que no sabia el Poeta si era de box, o de marfil.

Súlca del mar de Amor las rubias ondas,
Barco de Barcelona, y por los bellos
Lazos navega altivo aunque por ellos
Tal vez te muestras, y tal vez te escondas.
Ya no flechas Amor, doradas ondas
Taxe de sus esplendidos cabellos;
Tu con los dientes no le quites dellos,

+ Describe un monte,
Caen de un monte à un valle entre pizarras
Guarnecidas de fragiles elechos
A su margen carambanos deshechos
Que cercan olmos y silvestres parras;
Nadan en su cristal Ninfas bizarras
Compitiendo con el candidos pechos,
Dulces naves de amor, en mas estrechos

Para que a tanta dicha correspondas.
Desenvoelve los rizos con decoro
Los paralelos de mi sol desata,
Box, o colmillo de elefante Moro,
Y en tanto que esparcidos los dilata
Forma por la madexa sendas de oro
Antes que el tiempo los converta en platą.
sin que, ni para que.

Que las que salen de Españolas barras.
Tiene este monte por vasallo á un prado,
Que para tantas flores le importuna
Sangre las venas de su pecho elado.
Y en este monte y liquida laguna.
Para decir verdad, como hombre honrado,
Jamas me sucedió cosa ninguna.

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