History of Spanish Literature, vol. 1 (of 3)

HISTORY OF SPANISH LITERATURE.
VOL. I.
HISTORY OF SPANISH LITERATURE.
GEORGE TICKNOR.
IN THREE VOLUMES. VOLUME I.
NEW YORK:
HARPER AND BROTHERS, 82 CLIFF STREET
M DCCC XLIX.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by George Ticknor, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
In the year eighteen hundred and eighteen I travelled through a large part of Spain, and spent several months in Madrid. My object was to increase a very imperfect knowledge of the language and literature of the country, and to purchase Spanish books, always so rare in the great book-marts of the rest of Europe. In some respects, the time of my visit was favorable to the purposes for which I made it; in others, it was not. Such books as I wanted were then, it is true, less valued in Spain than they are now, but it was chiefly because the country was in a depressed and unnatural state; and, if its men of letters were more than commonly at leisure to gratify the curiosity of a stranger, their number had been materially diminished by political persecution, and intercourse with them was difficult because they had so little connection with each other, and were so much shut out from the world around them.
It was, in fact, one of the darkest periods of the reign of Ferdinand the Seventh, when the desponding seemed to think that the eclipse was not only total, but “beyond all hope of day.” The absolute power of the monarch had been as yet nowhere publicly questioned; and his government, which had revived the Inquisition and was not wanting in its spirit, had, from the first, silenced the press, and, wherever its influence extended, now threatened the extinction of all generous culture. Hardly four years had elapsed since the old order of things had been restored at Madrid, and already most of the leading men of letters, whose home was naturally in the capital, were in prison or in exile. Melendez Valdes, the first Spanish poet of the age, had just died in misery on the unfriendly soil of France. Quintana, in many respects the heir to his honors, was confined in the fortress of Pamplona. Martinez de la Rosa, who has since been one of the leaders of the nation as well as of its literature, was shut up in Peñon on the coast of Barbary. Moratin was languishing in Paris, while his comedies were applauded to the very echo by his enemies at home. The Duke de Rivas, who, like the old nobles of the proudest days of the monarchy, has distinguished himself alike in arms, in letters, and in the civil government and foreign diplomacy of his country, was living retired on the estates of his great house in Andalusia. Others of less mark and note shared a fate as rigorous; and, if Clemencin, Navarrete, and Marina were permitted still to linger in the capital from which their friends had been driven, their footsteps were watched and their lives were unquiet.