JAUREGUI.
If pure diction, joined to a descriptive style of the most perfect kind, might form a sufficient claim to the title of poet of the first rank, the right of Juan de Jauregui, or Xauregui, to that distinction, among the Spanish poets of the first half of the seventeenth century, could not be disputed. Jauregui, who was of Biscayan origin, but educated in the interior of Spain, first developed his talents in Italy. In that country he prosecuted his poetic studies, and at the same time thought it no degradation to practise painting as a profession, though he was a nobleman and a knight of the order of Calatrava. He is said to have excelled in painting even more than in poetry. While in Italy he made a Spanish translation of Tasso’s Amynta, in which he was so successful, that the translation is still regarded by the educated portion of his countrymen as possessing the characteristics of the happiest original composition. Jauregui was a decided opponent of the Gongorists; but his taste did not coincide with that of Quevedo. He devoted much talent and industry to a free translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia in octaves. He died in 1610; and his poetic remains, exclusive of his translations, are by no means numerous. The translation of Lucan was not published till long after the death of Jauregui; but ever since its appearance, the Spaniards have admired it as a classic composition; and it unquestionably possesses all the merit that the translation of such a work can possibly present. But from a man who could be induced to apply so much labour and time to a translation of Lucan, no very extraordinary proofs of poetic talent were to be expected; and it must be confessed that Jauregui, in none of his compositions has risen above what may be called the poetry of style. He might have carried this kind of merit still farther, had not his Lucan led him into a kind of mannered affectation. Among his original works, his Orfeo, a mythological tale, in five cantos, deserves to be distinguished.[512] But his lyric poems, and particularly his sonnets, bear evident traces of the man of genius and of cultivated mind.[513] Jauregui’s dramatic compositions, which were written with the view of reforming the national taste, are now lost to literature, and were at the time of their production indignantly banished from the stage. He is the author of some small works in prose, one of which is a treatise on painting.[514]