[452]. Madrid, 1624. Noted by Señor Menéndez (who has given the whole passage, iii. 457-60) as a specially rare book. Fortunately the British Museum, according to a wise habit of its own in such cases (cf. Capriano), has two copies, and M. Morel-Fatio has included the piece which concerns us in an invaluable collection (also including Lope’s Arte Nuevo and other things) of Spanish critical documents, which he is issuing in the Bulletin Hispanique of the Faculty of Letters of Bordeaux, and republishing separately (Paris, Fontemoing; Bordeaux, Feret, 1901-1902). The man who gives a text attains merit which mere commentators and historians can never hope to have imputed to them.
[453]. Also reprinted by M. Morel-Fatio in the issue noticed above.
[454]. Los casos de la honra son mejores, Porque mueven con fuerça a toda gente—A.N., 327, 328. At least one of Lope’s innumerable works, the Laurel de Apolo, written late in his life (1630), is busied with the poets of his time in the fashion of Caporali and Cervantes, but, it would seem, in a spirit of wholly uncritical panegyric.
[455]. V. sup., pp. [49], [50 note]. It is fair to say that Lope quotes Robortello.
[456]. Omnes dilaberentur. Señor Menéndez (iii. 444) gives all the important parts, both in Latin and Spanish. R. de[l] Turia, infra, has been reprinted, but the marrow of him also will be found in the Historia, as well as much else: for instance, an interesting Invectiva y Apologia, by Francesco de la Barreda in 1622, which is dignified by the words: “There was no greater dramatic-poetic written in the seventeenth century”—a large statement. But Barreda is certainly a staunch anti-Unitarian, and has well reached the important doctrine that “Art is merely a careful observation of classified [graduados] examples.” The whole dispute, in which the more or less great names of the Argensolas, Artieda, Cristóbal de Mesa, and others, figure, together with the subsequent one on culteranism, will be found exhaustively treated in the tenth chapter of the Historia, and more summarily, but still usefully, in Ticknor. Since most of the text was written M. Morel-Fatio, in his Défenseurs de la Comedia (v. sup., p. 343), has subjoined Turia to Tirso, and a certain Carlos Boyl to both, adding a notice of the Frenchman Ogier (v. sup., pp. 256, 257), who is already familiar to readers of these pages. Boyl, one of the Valencian group above referred to, wrote in “romance” form rules of the comedia nueva.
[457]. Let it be remembered that the curious passage on which Pope dwells (Ess. Crit., 267 sq.) is not Cervantic, but from the spurious and intrusive work of the mysterious Avellaneda.
[458]. Enthusiastically Englished, with much apparatus, by the late James Y. Gibson (London, 1883). It is closely modelled on the Viaggio di Parnasso of Cesare Caporali (1531-1601).
[459]. Or of their Spanish followers, such as Pinciano and Cascales. This opinion, formed independently from reading of Don Quixote, agrees with one of much more importance, that of Señor Menéndez himself. Nay, Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly (op. cit., p. 237) roundly pronounces Cervantes “the least critical of men.”
[460]. In his Works. Bibl. de Ribadeneyra.
[461]. In his Works. 2 vols., Barcelona, 1748.