ELOQUENCE, FORENSIC AND PULPIT.--LUIS DE LEON.--LUIS DE
GRANADA.--PARAVICINO AND THE SCHOOL OF BAD TASTE.--EPISTOLARY
CORRESPONDENCE.--ZURITA.--PEREZ.--SANTA TERESA.--ARGENSOLA.--LOPE DE
VEGA.--QUEVEDO.--CASCALES.--ANTONIO.--SOLÍS.
We shall hardly look for forensic or deliberative eloquence in
Spain. The whole constitution of things there, the political and
ecclesiastical institutions of the country, and, perhaps we should add,
the very genius of the people, were unfriendly to the growth of a plant
like this, which flourishes only in the soil of freedom.
The Spanish tribunals, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
whether in the ordinary course of their administration of justice, or
in the dark proceedings of the Inquisition, took less cognizance of the
influences of eloquence than those of any other Christian country of
modern times. They dealt with the wheel and the fagot,--not with the
spirit of persuasion. Nor was this spirit truly known or favored in
the political assemblies of the kingdom, though it was not supplanted
there by the formidable instruments familiar in the courts of justice.
In the ancient Cortes of Castile, and still more in those of Aragon,
there may have been discussions which were raised by their fervor to
something like what we now call deliberative eloquence. We have, in
fact, intimations of such discussions in the old chronicles; especially
in those that record the troubles and violence of the great nobles in
the reigns of John the Second and Henry the Fourth. But a free, living
debate on a great political principle, or on the conduct of those
who managed the affairs of the country,--such a debate as sometimes
shook the popular assemblies of antiquity, and in modern times has
often controlled the destinies of Christendom,--was, in Spain, a thing
absolutely unknown.
Even the grave and dry discussions, to which the pressure of affairs
gave rise, were rare and accidental. There was no training for them;
and they could be followed by none of the great practical results
that are at once the only sufficient motive and reward that can make
them enter freely into the institutions of a state. Indeed, whatever
there was of discussion in any open assembly could occur only in the
earlier period of the monarchy, when the language and culture of the
nation were still too little advanced to produce specimens of careful
debate; for from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and the days of
the _Comunidades_, the Cortes were gradually restrained in their
privileges, until at last they ceased to be any thing but a part of
the pageantry of the empire, and served only to record the laws they
should themselves have discussed and modelled. From this period,
all opportunity for the growth of political eloquence in Spain was
lost. It would have been no more tolerated by one of the Philips than
Lutheranism.
The eloquence of the pulpit was checked by similar causes, but in a
different way. The Catholic religion has maintained in Spain, down to
a late period, more than it has in any other country, the character
it had during the Middle Ages. It has been to an extraordinary degree
a religion of mysteries, of forms, and of penance;--a religion,
therefore, in which such modes of moving the understanding and the
heart as have prevailed in France and England since the middle of the
seventeenth century have been rarely attempted, and never with great
success.
If any exception is to be made to this remark, it must be made in the
case of Luis de Leon and in that of Luis de Granada. Of the first we
have already spoken. He printed, indeed, no sermons as such; but he
inserted in his other works, and especially in his “Names of Christ”
and in his “Perfect Wife,” long declamations, sometimes preceded by a
text and sometimes not, but regularly divided into heads, and wearing
the general appearance and attributes of religious discourses. These,
since they were printed as early as 1584, may be accounted the earliest
specimens of Spanish eloquence fitted for the pulpit, and, if not
actually delivered, are still worthy of notice.[191]
[191] The most remarkable, and perhaps the most beautiful,
specimen is in the first book of “The Names of Christ”; the text
being from Isaiah, ix. 6: “The everlasting Father.”
The case of Luis de Granada is one more directly in point. That
remarkable man was head of the Dominican order, or the order of the
Preaching Monks, so that both his place and his profession led him to
the cultivation of the eloquence of the pulpit. But, besides this,
he seems to have devoted himself to it with the strong preference of
genius, preaching extemporaneously, it is said, with great power and
unction. In 1576, he published a Latin treatise on the subject of
Pulpit Eloquence; and in 1595, after his death, his friends printed, in
addition to those published during his lifetime, fourteen of his more
formal discourses, in which he has been thought, not only to have given
a full illustration of the precepts he inculcated, but to have placed
himself at the head of the department of eloquence to which he devoted
so much of his life.
They are in a bold and affluent style,--somewhat mystical, as were his
own religious tendencies,--and often more declamatory than seems in
keeping with the severe and solemn nature of their subjects; but they
are written with remarkable purity of idiom, and breathe everywhere
the spirit of the religion that was so deeply impressed on his age and
country. Perhaps a more characteristic specimen of Spanish eloquence
can hardly be found, than that in which Luis de Granada describes the
resurrection of the Saviour; adding to it his descent into hell to
rescue the souls of the righteous who were pining there because they
had died before his great sacrifice was completed,--a doctrine of the
Catholic Church capable of high poetical ornament, and one which, from
the time of Dante, has been often set forth with the most solemn effect.
“On that glorious day,” exclaims Luis de Granada, in his sermon on the
Resurrection, “the sun shone more brightly than on all others, serving
its Lord in dutiful splendor amidst his rejoicings, as it had served
him in darkness through his sufferings. The heavens, which had been
veiled in mourning to hide his agonies, were now bright with redoubled
glory as they saw him rise conquering from the grave. And who would
not rejoice in such a day? The whole humanity of Christ rejoiced in
it; all the disciples of Christ rejoiced in it; heaven rejoiced, earth
rejoiced; hell itself shared in the general jubilee. For the triumphant
Prince descended into its depths, clothed with splendor and might.
The everlasting darkness grew bright before his steps; the eternal
lamentations ceased; the realms of torment paused at his approach. The
princes of Edom were disturbed, and the mighty men of Moab trembled,
and they that dwelt in the land of Canaan were filled with fear. And
the multitude of the suffering murmured and said, ‘Who is this mighty
one, so resplendent, so powerful? Never before was his likeness seen in
these realms of hell; never hath the tributary world sent such a one to
these depths,--one who demands judgment, not a debtor; one who fills us
with dread, not one guilty like ourselves; a judge, and not a culprit;
a conqueror, not a sinner. Say, where were our watchmen and our guards,
when he burst in victory on our barred gates? By what might has he
entered? And who is he, that can do these things? If he were guilty, he
were not thus bold; if the shade of sin lay on his soul, how could our
darkness be made bright with his glory? If he be God, why should hell
receive him? and if he be man, whence hath he this might? If he be God,
why dwelt he in the grave? and if man, by what authority would he thus
lay waste our abodes?’
“Thus murmured the vassals of hell, as the Conqueror entered in glory
to free his chosen captives. For there stood they, all assembled
together,--all the souls of the just, who from the foundation of the
world till that day had passed through the gates of the grave; all the
prophets and men of might who had glorified the Lord in the manifold
agonies of martyrdom;--a glorious company!--a mighty treasure!--the
richest inheritance of Christ’s triumph! For there stood the two
original parents of the generations of mankind,--the first in sin and
the first in faith and hope. There stood that aged saint who rescued
in the ark of safety those that repeopled the world when the waters of
the deluge were spent. There stood the father of the faithful, who
first received by merit the revelation of God’s will, and wore, in
his person, the marks of his election. There stood his obedient son,
who, bearing on his shoulders the wood of his own sacrifice, showed
forth the redemption of the world. There stood the holy progenitor of
the Twelve Tribes, who, winning his father’s blessing in the stranger
guise of another’s garb, set forth the mystery of the humanity and
incarnation of the Divine Word. There stood, also, as it were, guests
newly arrived in that strange land, the Holy Baptist and the blessed
Simeon, who prayed that he might not be taken from the earth till with
his own eyes he had seen its salvation; who received it in his arms,
and sang gently its canticle of peace. And there, too, found a place
the poor Lazarus of the Gospel, who, for the patience with which he
bore his wounds, deserved to join so noble a company, and share its
longing hopes. And all this multitude of sanctified spirits stood
there mourning and grieving for this day; and in the midst of them
all, and as the leader of them all, the holy king and prophet repeated
without ceasing his ancient lamentation: ‘As the hart panteth after the
water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God! My tears have been
my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy
God?’ O blessed and holy king, if this be the cause of thy lamentation,
let it cease for ever; for behold thy God! behold thy Saviour! Change,
then, thy chant, and sing as thou wast wont to sing of old: ‘Lord, thou
hast been favorable unto thy land; thou hast pardoned the offences
of thy people; thou hast hidden thy face from the multitude of their
sins.’”[192]
[192] See the accounts of Luis de Granada in Antonio, and in the
Preface to the “Guia de Pecadores,” Madrid, 1781, 2 tom. 8vo. His
treatise on pulpit eloquence, entitled “Rhetoricæ Ecclesiasticæ,
sive de Ratione Concionandi, Libri Sex,” was valued in other
countries. An edition of it, Cologne, 1611, 12mo, fills above 500
closely printed pages. It is somewhat remarkable, that, besides
the sermon on the Resurrection, from which the extract I have
translated was made, one of the best of his meditations, that
entitled “De la Alegría de los Santos Padres,” is on the same
subject. He was born in 1504, and died in 1588.
It would not be easy to select a more striking example than this of the
peculiar rhetoric that was most sought in the Spanish pulpit. But the
portions of equal merit are few, and the amount of the whole is small.
After the beginning of the seventeenth century, the affected style of
Góngora and the conceits of the school of Ledesma found their way into
the churches generally, and especially into the churches of Madrid.
This was natural. No persons depended more on the voice of fashion than
the preachers of the court and the capital, and the fashion of both was
thoroughly infected with the new doctrines. Paravicino, at this period,
was at the head of the popular preachers; himself a poet devoted to the
affectations of Góngora; a man of wit, a gentleman, and a courtier.
From 1616 he was, during twenty years, pulpit orator to Philip the
Third and Philip the Fourth, and enjoyed, as such, a kind and degree
of popularity before unknown. As might have been expected, he had
many followers, each of whom sought to have a fashionable audience.
Such audiences were soon systematically provided. They were, in fact,
collected, arranged, and seated by the friends and admirers of the
preacher himself,--generally by those who, from their ecclesiastical
relations, had an interest in his success; and then the crowds thus
gathered were induced in different ways to express their approbation
of the more elaborate passages in his discourse. From this time, and
in this way, religious dignity disappeared from the Spanish pulpit,
and whatever there was of value in its eloquence was confined to two
forms,--the learned discussions, often in Latin, addressed to bodies
of ecclesiastics, and the extemporaneous exhortations addressed to the
lower classes;--the latter popular and vehement in their tone, and,
by their coarseness, generally unworthy of the solemn subjects they
touched.[193]
[193] For Paravicino and his school, see Sedano, (Parnaso
Español, Tom. V. p. xlviii.,) Baena, (Hijos de Madrid, Tom. II.
p. 389,) and Antonio, (Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 612,) who speaks
as if he had often heard Paravicino’s eloquence, and witnessed
its effects. _E contra_ is Figueroa, who, in his “Pasagero,”
(1617, Alivio IV.,) is severe upon the preachers and audiences of
Madrid. The fact, however, that Capmany, in his five important
volumes devoted to Spanish eloquence, has been able to find
nothing in the seventeenth century, either in the way of forensic
orations or popular pulpit eloquence, with which to fill his
pages, but is obliged to resort to the eloquent prose of history
and philosophy, of ethics and religious asceticism, tells at
once, in a way not to be mistaken, the tale of the deficiencies
in Castilian eloquence, as the word _eloquence_ is understood in
English.
* * * * *
There is little in Spanish epistolary correspondence that requires
notice as a portion of the elegant literature of the country. The
heartiness of a simpler age gives, indeed, a charm to such letters as
those which claim to have been written by Cibdareal, and in a less
degree to those of Pulgar and Diego de Valera. Later, the despatches
of Columbus, in which he made known to the world his vast discoveries,
are occasionally marked by the fervor of an enthusiasm inspired by
his great subject; and those of his queen and patron, though few in
number and less interesting, are quite as characteristic and quite as
true-hearted.
But, with the stately court brought from the North by Charles the
Fifth, all this was changed. Added forms, and more than the old
national gravity, passed into the intercourse of social life, and
infected the style of the commonest correspondence. Genial familiarity
disappeared from the letters of friends, and even private affections
and feelings were either seldom expressed, or were so covered up as
to be with difficulty recognized. Thus, what was most valued in this
department at the time, and for a century afterwards, were Guevara’s
“Golden Epistles,” which are only formal dissertations, and the
“Epistles” of Avila, which are sermons in disguise, that moved the
hearts of his countrymen because they were such earnest exhortations to
a religious life.[194]
[194] These writers have all been mentioned earlier, (see,
_ante_, Vol. I. pp. 395, 540, 543,) except Queen Isabella, whose
letters are best found in Clemencin’s excellent work on her
character and times, filling the sixth volume of the “Memorias de
la Academia de la Historia.” They are addressed to her confessor,
Hernando de Talavera, and strongly illustrate both her prudence
and her submission to ecclesiastical influences. (See pp.
351-383.) Several letters addressed to Columbus, and marked with
her spirit rather than that of her husband, though signed by both
of them, may be seen in the second volume of Navarrete, (Viages,
etc.,) which is rich in such curious documents.
From these remarks, however, we should except portions of the
correspondence of Zurita, the historian, extending over the last thirty
years of his life, and ending in 1582, just before his death. They
give us the business-like intercourse of a man of letters, carried on
with all classes of society, from ministers of state and the highest
ecclesiastics of the realm down to persons distinguished only because
they were occupied in studies like his own. The number of letters in
this collection is large, amounting to above two hundred. More of them
are from Antonio Agustin, Archbishop of Tarragona, an eminent scholar
in Spanish history and civil law, than from any other person; but the
most interesting are from Zurita himself, from his friend Ambrosio
Morales, from Diego de Mendoza, the historian, Argote de Molina, the
antiquarian, and Fernan Nuñez, the Greek Commander. Each of these
series is marked by something characteristic of its author, and all of
them, taken together, show more familiarly the interior condition of a
scholar’s life in Spain, in the sixteenth century, than it can be found
anywhere else.[195]
[195] The correspondence of Zurita and his friends is to be
sought in the “Progresos de la Historia en el Reyno de Aragon,”
by Diego Josef Dormer, (Zaragoza, 1680, folio,) and especially
pp. 362-563, which are entirely given up to it.
But the principal exception to be made in favor of Spanish epistolary
correspondence is found in the case of Antonio Perez, secretary of
Philip the Second, and for some time his favorite minister. His father,
who was a scholar, and made a translation of the “Odyssey,”[196] had
been in the employment of Charles the Fifth, so that the younger Perez
inherited somewhat of the court influence which was then so important;
but his rapid advancement was owing to his own genius, and to a love
of intrigue and adventure, which seemed to be a part of his nature. At
last, in 1578, at the command of his master, he not unwillingly brought
about the murder of Escovedo, a person high in the confidence of Don
John of Austria, whose growing influence it was thought worth while
thus to curtail;--a crime which, perpetrated as it was in consequence
of the official connection of the secretary with the monarch, brought
Perez to the very height of his favor.
[196] “La Ulyxea de Homero,” etc., por Gonzalo Perez, (Venecia,
1553, 18mo,) is in blank verse; but in this edition we have
only the first thirteen books, with a dedication to Philip the
Prince, whose chief secretary Gonzalo Perez then was, as his
son Antonio was afterwards secretary of the same Philip on the
throne. Subsequently, when he had translated the remaining eleven
books, he dedicated the whole anew to Philip as king, (Anvers,
1556, 12mo,) correcting and amending the first part carefully.
Lope de Vega (in his Dorotea, Acto IV. sc. 3) praises the version
of Perez; but, like most of the Spanish translations from the
ancients in the sixteenth century, it shows little of the spirit
of the original.
But it was not long before the guilty agent became as unwelcome to his
guilty master as their victim had been. A change in their relations
followed, cautiously brought on by the unscrupulous king, but deep and
entire. At first, Philip permitted Perez to be pursued by the kinsmen
of the murdered man, and afterwards, contriving plausible pretexts
for hiding his motives, began himself to join in the persecution.
Eleven long years the wretched courtier was watched, vexed, and
imprisoned, at Madrid; and once, at least, he was subjected to cruel
bodily tortures. When he could endure this no longer, he fled to
Aragon, his native kingdom, whose freer political constitution did
not permit him to be crushed in secret. This was a great surprise
to Philip, and, for an instant, seems to have disconcerted his dark
schemes. But his resources were equal to the emergency. He pursued
Perez to Saragossa, and finding the regular means of justice unequal
to the demands of his vengeance, caused his victim to be seized by the
Inquisition, under the absurd charge of heresy. But this, again, in the
form in which Philip found it necessary to proceed, was a violation
of the ancient privileges of the kingdom, and the people broke out
into open rebellion, and released Perez from prison;--a consequence
of his measures, which, perhaps, was neither unforeseen by Philip
nor unwelcome to him. At any rate, he immediately sent an army into
Aragon, sufficient, not only to overwhelm all open resistance, but to
strike a terror that should prevent future opposition to his will; and
the result, besides a vast number of rich confiscations to the royal
treasury, was the condemnation of sixty-eight persons of distinction to
death by the Inquisition, and the final overthrow of nearly every thing
that remained of the long-cherished liberties of the country.
Meantime, Perez escaped secretly from Saragossa, as he had before
escaped from Madrid, and, wandering over the Pyrenees in the disguise
of a shepherd, sought refuge in Bearn, at the little court of Catherine
of Bourbon, sister of Henry the Fourth. Public policy caused him to be
well received both there and in France, where he afterwards passed the
greater part of his long exile. During the troubles between Elizabeth
and Philip, he instinctively went to England, and, while there, was
much with Essex, and became more familiar with Bacon than the wise and
pious mother of the future chancellor thought it well one so profligate
as Perez should be. Philip, who could ill endure the idea of having
such a witness of his crimes intriguing at the courts of his great
enemies, endeavoured to have Perez assassinated both in Paris and
London, and failed more from accident than from want of well-concerted
plans to accomplish his object.
At last peace came between France and England on one side, and Spain
on the other; and Perez ceased to be a person of consequence to those
who had so long used him. Henry the Fourth, indeed, with his customary
good nature, still indulged him even in very extravagant modes of
life, which rather resembled those of a prince than of an exile. But
his claims were so unreasonable, and were urged with such boldness and
pertinacity, that every body wearied of him. He therefore fell into
unhonored poverty, and dragged out the miserable life of a neglected
courtier till 1611, when he died at Paris. Four years later, the
Inquisition, which had caused him to be burnt in effigy as a heretic,
reluctantly did him the imperfect justice of removing their anathemas
from his memory, and thus permitted his children to enter into civil
rights, of which nothing but the most shameless violence had ever
deprived them.
From the time of his first imprisonment, Perez began to write the
letters that are still extant; and their series never stops, till we
approach the period of his death. Some of them are to his wife and
children; others, to Gil de Mesa, his confidential friend and agent;
and others, to persons high in place, from whose influence he hoped to
gain favor. His Narratives, or “Relations,” as he calls them, and his
“Memorial” on his own case, occasionally involve other letters, and are
themselves in the nature of long epistles, written with great talent
and still greater ingenuity, to gain the favor of his judges or of the
world. All these, some of which his position forbade him ever to send
to the persons to whom they were addressed, he carefully preserved,
and during his exile published them from time to time to suit his own
political purposes;--at first anonymously, or under the assumed name
of Raphael Peregrino; afterwards under the seeming editorship of his
friend Mesa; and finally, without disguise of any sort, dedicating some
of them to Henry the Fourth, and some to the Pope.
Their number is large, amounting in the most ample collection to
above a thousand pages. The best are those that are most familiar;
for even in the slightest of them, as when he is sending a present of
gloves to Lady Rich, or a few new-fashioned toothpicks to the Duke of
Mayenne, there is a nice preservation of the Castilian proprieties
of expression. Many of them sparkle with genius; sometimes most
unexpectedly, though not always in good taste; Thus, to his innocent
wife, shamefully kept in prison during his exile, he says: “Though you
are not allowed to write to me, or to enjoy what to the absent is the
breath of life; yet here [in France] there is no punishment for the
promptings of natural affection. I answer, therefore, what I hear in
the spirit, your complaints of the punishment laid on your own virtues
and on the innocence of your children,--complaints, which reach me
from that asylum of darkness and of the shadow of death, in which you
now lie. But when I listen, it seems as if I ought to hear you no less
with my outward ears, just as the words and cries that come from the
caves under the earth only resound the louder, as they are rolled up
to us from their dark hiding-places.”[197] And again, when speaking
of the cruel conduct of his judges to his family, he breaks out: “But
let them not be deceived. Their victims may be imprisoned and loaded
with irons; but they have the two mightiest advocates of the earth
to defend them,--their innocence and their wrongs. For neither could
Cicero nor Demosthenes so pierce the ears of men, nor so stir up their
minds, nor so shake the frame of things, as can these two, to whom God
has given the especial privilege to stand for ever in his presence, to
cry for justice, and to be witnesses and advocates for one another in
whatsoever he has reserved for his own awful judgment.”[198]
[197] Obras, Genevra, 1654, 12mo, p. 1073.
[198] Ibid., p. 96.
The letters of Perez are in a great variety of styles, from the
cautious and yet fervent appeals that he made to Philip the Second,
down to the gallant notes he wrote to court ladies, and the
overflowings of his heart to his young children. But they are all
written in remarkably idiomatic Castilian, and are rendered interesting
from the circumstance, that in each class there is a strict observance
of such conventional forms as were required by the relative social
positions of the author and his correspondents.[199]
[199] The first publication of Perez, I think, is the one made
at Lyons, without date, but supposed to be of 1598, and entitled
“Pedaços de Historia,” etc.; but, the same year, the contents of
this volume were reprinted at Paris, with the more appropriate
title of “Relaciones.” Perez seems to have amused himself with
publishing different portions of his works at different times and
in different places; but the most complete collection is that of
Geneva, 1654, 12mo, pp. 1126. His life is admirably discussed by
M. Mignet, in his “Antonio Perez et Philippe II.” (2de édit.,
Paris, 1846). The work of Salvador Bermudez de Castro, entitled
“Antonio Perez, Estudios Históricos,” (Madrid, 1841, 8vo,) would
be better worth reading if the author had not permitted himself
to indulge in fictions, such as ballad poetry, which he calls
the poetry of Perez, and which he gives as part of the means
Perez used to stir up the people of Saragossa, but which is, no
doubt, the work of Castro himself. The lives of Perez in Baena
(Tom. I., 1789, p. 121) and Latassa (Bib. Nov., Tom. II., 1799,
p. 108) show how afraid men of letters were, as late as the end
of the eighteenth century, to approach any subject thus connected
with royalty. The works of Perez are strictly forbidden by the
Index Expurgatorius of the Inquisition to the last,--in 1790 and
1805. The letters of Perez to Essex are in pretty good Latin,
and out of his Spanish works there were early made two or three
collections of very acute and striking aphorisms, which have
been several times printed. There are many MS. letters of Perez
at the Hague and elsewhere, referred to by Mignet, and there is
in the Royal Library at Paris an important political treatise
which bears his name, but which, though strongly marked with his
acuteness and brilliancy, Ochoa hesitates to attribute to him. It
is, however, I doubt not, his. (See Ochoa, Manuscritos Españoles,
pp. 158-166; and Seminario Erudito, Tom. VIII. pp. 245 and 250.)
Further accounts of Perez are to be found in Llorente, Tom. III.
pp. 316-375.
The letters of Santa Teresa, who was a contemporary of the secretary of
Philip the Second, and died in 1582, are entirely different; for while
nothing can be more practical and worldly than those of Perez, the
letters of the devout nun are entirely spiritual. She believed herself
to be inspired, and therefore wrote with an air of authority, which
is almost always solemn and imposing, but which sometimes, through
its very boldness and freedom from all restraint, becomes easy and
graceful. Her talents were versatile and her perceptions acute. To each
of her many correspondents she says something that seems suited to the
occasion on which she is consulted;--a task not easy for a nun, who
lived forty-seven years in retirement from the world, and during that
time was called upon to give advice to archbishops and bishops, to wise
and able statesmen like Diego de Mendoza, to men of genius like Luis de
Granada, to persons in private life who were in deep affliction or in
great danger, and to women in the ordinary course of their daily lives.
Her letters fill four volumes, and though, in general, they are only
to be regarded as fervent exhortations or religious teachings, still,
by the purity, beauty, and womanly grace of their style, they may
fairly claim a distinguished place in the epistolary literature of her
country.[200]
[200] “Cartas de Santa Teresa de Jesus,” Madrid, 1793, 4 tom.
4to,--chiefly written in the latter part of her life.
Some portions of the correspondence of Bartolomé de Argensola about
1625, of Lope de Vega before 1630, and of Quevedo a little later, have
been preserved to us; but they are too inconsiderable in amount to have
much value. Of Cascales, the rhetorician, we have more. In 1634, he
printed three Decades of Letters; but they are almost entirely devoted
to discussions of points that involve learned lore; and, even where
they are not such, they are stiff and formal. A few by Nicolas Antonio,
the literary historian, who died in 1684, are plain and business-like,
but are written in a hard style, that prevents them from being
interesting. Those of Solís, who closes up the century and the period,
are better. They are such as belong to the intercourse of an old man,
left to struggle through the last years of a long life with poverty and
misfortune, and express the feelings becoming his situation, both with
philosophical calmness and Christian resignation.[201]
[201] The letters of Argensola are in the “Cartas de Varios
Autores Españoles,” by Mayans y Siscar, (Valencia, 1773, 5 tom.
12mo,)--itself a monument of the poverty of Spanish literature
in that department from which it attempts to make a collection,
since by far the greater part of it consists of old printed
dedications, formal epistles of approbation that had been
prefixed to books when they were first published, lives of
authors that had served as prefaces to their works, etc. The
letters of Quevedo and Lope are chiefly on literary subjects, and
are scattered through their respective writings. Those of Antonio
and Solís are in a small volume published by Mayans at Lyons,
in 1733; to which may be added those at the end of Antonio’s
“Censura de Historias Fabulosas,” Madrid, 1742, fol. The “Cartas
Philologicas” of Cascales, (of which there is a neat edition by
Sanchez, Madrid, 1779, 8vo,) are to Spain and the age in which
they were written what the terse and pleasant letters published
by Melmoth, under the pseudonyme of Fitzosborne, are to England
in the reign of George II.,--an attempt to unite as much learning
as the public would bear with an infusion of lighter matter in
discussions connected with morals and manners.
But no writer in the history of Spanish epistolary correspondence can
be compared for acuteness and brilliancy with Antonio Perez, or for
eloquence with Santa Teresa.