VELASQUEZ.
Among the number of the Spanish Gallicists must likewise be included that intelligent writer Luis Joseph de Velasquez. His History of Spanish Poetry, (Origenes de la Poesia Española), which was published in 1754, proves that the Spaniards had then, in a great measure, forgotten their national literature. Velasquez unquestionably took considerable pains to collect, with critical spirit, those facts which were probably better known to him than to any of his contemporaries; and yet he has, upon the whole, obscured rather than elucidated the history of Spanish poetry. His criticism is quite in the French style, with a slight tincture of Spanish patriotism. Velasquez was a member of the French academy of inscriptions and belles lettres.
Not a single Spanish poet of distinguished merit flourished during the first half of the eighteenth century. That such a barrenness should have succeeded so great a fertility of talent, is a circumstance which the exhaustion of the national spirit does not sufficiently explain. It is also necessary to take into the account the conflict maintained between favour shewn to the French style and the demands of the Spanish public. Supported by national approbation, the Spanish poetry had gloriously flourished; but it perished when new arbiters of taste, who judged according to foreign principles, could with impunity treat the Spanish public as an ignorant multitude.[601] In this collision Spanish eloquence sustained no immediate injury. The influence of the French style, could indeed at that time do it no injury, for at the commencement of the eighteenth century, French prose was fitted to serve as a model for clearness, precision, facility and elegance. But no aspiring spirit now animated Spanish authors. Books written in correct prose were produced in sufficient numbers; and yet no work appeared which deserved particular distinction for rhetorical merit, or which contributed in any degree to invigorate the literature of Spain.