On meeting in his works with these brilliant passages, after paying them the high admiration they deserve, we cannot restrain a feeling of indignation, to see the deplorable abuse which Quevedo has made of his talents, in employing on the useless evolutions and balanced movements of a tumbler, the muscular limbs and strength of an Alcides.
Don Francisco Manuel Melo was a friend of Quevedo, a Portuguese, and as indefatigable a writer as he was an active warrior and politician. He managed the Castilian idiom with equal facility as his own, and poet, historian, moralist, author political, military, and even religious, he excels in some of these departments, and is contemptible in none. The volume of his verses is extremely rare, and though some have made him the imitator of Góngora, he has more points of resemblance to Quevedo; the same taste in versification, the same austerity of principles, the same affectation of sententiousness, the same copiousness of doctrine. He has besides conformed to the example of Quevedo in publishing his poems, in divisions of the nine Muses, though three of them are in Portuguese. There are in the Spaniard colours more brilliant, and strokes more strong; in Melo more sobriety and fewer extravagances. His style, though elegant and pure, is barely poetical; and his amatory verses are deficient in tenderness and fire, as are his odes in enthusiasm and loftiness. He is as little happy in the many burlesque verses with which the large volume of his poetry abounds; but when the subject is grave and serious, then his philosophy and doctrine sustain him, and his expression equals his ideas. Naturally inclined to maxims and reflections, he was most at home in moral poetry; in the epistle particularly, where strength and severity of thought best combine with a tempered and less profound fancy. Here, if he is not always a great painter, he is at least chaste and severe in style and language, in his verse sonorous, grave and elevated in his thoughts, a respectable moralist in character and principles. Notwithstanding these distinctions, the claims of his glory as a writer are more firmly grounded on his prose works; on the Eco politico for instance, on his Aula militar, and, above all, on the Historia de las alteraciones de Cataluña, the most excellent production of his pen, and perhaps the best work of its kind in the Castilian language.
Poetry was meanwhile expiring; tortured by such demoniacs, it could not recover its beauty and freshness from the aid of the few who yet composed with care, and wrote with greater purity. Rebolledo had neither force nor fancy, and his verses are nothing more than rhymed prose: Esquilache, with somewhat more grace in his romances, was spruce and affected, and had neither the talent nor strength which are necessary for higher compositions: Ulloa wrote nothing good but his Raquel: and lastly, Solis, who sometimes shows himself a poet in his comedies, and often in his history, is a mere rhymester in his lyrics, which now are read by none. How could these emasculated writers raise the art from the abyss into which it had fallen? The thing was impossible. This vicious taste was reduced to a system in the extravagant and singular work of Gracian, Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio, which is an art of writing in prose and verse, founded on the most absurd principles, and supported by good and bad specimens, jumbled together in the most discordant manner. This Gracian is the same that composed a descriptive poem on the seasons, under the title of Silvas del Año; the first I fancy that was written in Europe on this subject, and most assuredly the worst. As a specimen of his manner, and of the laughable degradation to which poetry had fallen, the following verses will suffice, selected from the opening of Summer:—
"After, in the celestial theatre,
The horseman of the day is seen to spur
To the refulgent Bull, in his brave hold
Shaking for darts his rays of burning gold.
The beauteous spectacle of stars—a crowd
Of lovely dames, his tricks applaud aloud;
They, to enjoy the splendour of the fight,
Remain on heaven's high balcony of light.
Then in strange metamorphosis, with spurs
And crest of fire, red-throated Phœbus stirs,
Like a proud cock amongst the hens divine
Hatched out of Leda's egg, the Twins that shine,
Hens of the heavenly field."
This is beyond every thing: the whole poem is written in the same barbarous and ridiculous manner, and it is a proof as evident as mournful, that there now remained no memory of the principles of composition, no vestiges of eloquence. Ornaments, suited to the madrigal and epigram, were transferred to the higher kinds of composition, and the whole was changed into concetti, conundrums, puns, and antitheses. Thus Castilian poesy came to an end! In her more tender youth, the simple flowers of the field which Garcilasso gathered sufficed to adorn her; in the fine writings of Herrera and Rioja, she presents herself with the pomp of a beautiful lady, richly attired; in Balbuena, Jauregui, and Lope de Vega, although too free and gay, she yet preserved traits of elegance and beauty; but first spoiled by the contortions taught her by Góngora and Quevedo, she afterwards gave herself up to a crowd of Vandals, who completed her ruin. Thenceforward her movements became convulsions, her colours paint, her jewels tinsel, and old and decrepid, there was nothing more for her to do than madly to act the girl, to wither, and to perish.