Thus, in the fourth chapter, after telling the commonly received tale, or, as he calls it, “the naked story,” of the Garden of the Hesperides, he gives us an allegory of it, showing that Libya, where the fair garden is placed, is human nature, dry and sandy; that Atlas, its lord, is the wise man, who knows how to cultivate his poor desert; that the garden is the garden of knowledge, divided according to the sciences; that the tree in the midst is philosophy; that the dragon watching the tree is the difficulty of study; and that the three Hesperides are Intelligence, Memory, and Eloquence. All this and more he explains under the third head, by giving the facts which he would have us suppose constituted the foundation of the first two; telling us that King Atlas was a wise king of the olden time, who first arranged and divided all the sciences; and that Hercules went to him and acquired them, after which he returned and imparted his acquisitions to King Eurystheus. And, finally, in the fourth part of the chapter, he applies it all to the Christian priesthood and the duty of this priesthood to become learned and explain the Scriptures to the ignorant laity; as if there were any possible analogy between them and Hercules and his fables.[600]
The book, however, is worth the trouble of reading. It is, no doubt, full of the faults peculiar to its age, and abounds in awkward citations from Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and other Latin authors, then so rarely found and so little known in Spain, that they added materially to the interest and value of the treatise.[601] But the allegory is sometimes amusing; the language is almost always good, and occasionally striking by fine archaisms; and the whole has a dignity about it which is not without its appropriate power and grace.[602]
From the Marquis of Villena himself, it is natural for us to turn to one of his followers, known only as “Macias el Enamorado,” or Macias the Lover; a name which constantly recurs in Spanish literature with a peculiar meaning, given by the tragical history of the poet who bore it. He was a Galician gentleman, who served the Marquis of Villena as one of his esquires, and became enamoured of a maiden attached to the same princely household with himself. But the lady, though he won her love, was married, under the authority that controlled both of them, to a knight of Porcuna. Still Macias in no degree restrained his passion, but continued to express it to her in his verses, as he had done before. The husband was naturally offended, and complained to the Marquis, who, after in vain rebuking his follower, used his full power as Grand Master of the Order of Calatrava, and cast Macias into prison. But there he only devoted himself more passionately to the thoughts of his lady, and, by his persevering love, still more provoked her husband, who, secretly following him to his prison at Arjonilla, and watching him one day as he chanced to be singing of his love and his sufferings, was so stung by jealousy, that he cast a dart through the gratings of the window, and killed the unfortunate poet with the name of his lady still trembling on his lips.
The sensation produced by the death of Macias was such as belongs only to an imaginative age, and to the sympathy felt for one who perished because he was both a Troubadour and a lover. All men who desired to be thought cultivated mourned his fate. His few poems in his native Galician—only one of which, and that of moderate merit, is preserved entire—became generally known, and were generally admired. His master, the Marquis of Villena, Rodriguez del Padron, who was his countryman, Juan de Mena, the great court poet, and the still greater Marquis of Santillana, all bore testimony, at the time or immediately afterwards, to the general sorrow. Others followed their example; and the custom of referring constantly to him and to his melancholy fate was continued in ballads and popular songs, until, in the poetry of Lope de Vega, Calderon, and Quevedo, the name of Macias passed into a proverb, and became synonymous with the highest and tenderest love.[603]
CHAPTER XIX.
Marquis of Santillana. — His Life. — His Tendency to imitate the Italian and the Provençal. — His Courtly Style. — His Works. — His Character. — Juan de Mena. — His Life. — His Shorter Poems. — His Labyrinth, and its Merits.
Next after the king and Villena in rank, and much before them in merit, stands, at the head of the courtiers and poets of the reign of John the Second, Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana; one of the most distinguished members of that great family which has sometimes claimed the Cid for its founder,[604] and which certainly, with a long succession of honors, reaches down to our own times.[605] He was born in 1398, but was left an orphan in early youth; so that, though his father, the Grand Admiral of Castile, had, at the time of his death, larger possessions than any other nobleman in the kingdom, the son, when he was old enough to know their value, found them chiefly wrested from him by the bold barons who in the most lawless manner then divided among themselves the power and resources of the crown.
But the young Mendoza was not of a temper to submit patiently to such wrongs. At the age of sixteen he already figures in the chronicles of the time, as one of the dignitaries of state who honored the coronation of Ferdinand of Aragon;[606] and at the age of eighteen, we are told, he boldly reclaimed his possessions, which, partly through the forms of law and partly by force of arms, he recovered.[607] From this period we find him, during the reign of John the Second, busy in the affairs of the kingdom, both civil and military; always a personage of great consideration, and apparently one who, in difficult circumstances and wild times, acted from manly motives. When only thirty years old, he was distinguished at court as one of the persons concerned in arranging the marriage of the Infanta of Aragon;[608] and, soon afterwards, had a separate command against the Navarrese, in which, though he suffered a defeat from greatly superior numbers, he acquired lasting honor by his personal bravery and firmness.[609] Against the Moors he commanded long, and was often successful; and after the battle of Olmedo, in 1445, he was raised to the very high rank of Marquis; none in Castile having preceded him in that title except the family of Villena, already extinct.[610]
He was early, but not violently, opposed to the great favorite, the Constable Alvaro de Luna. In 1432, some of his friends and kinsmen, the good Count Haro and the Bishop of Palencia, with their adherents, having been seized by order of the Constable, Mendoza shut himself up in his strongholds till he was fully assured of his own safety.[611] From this time, therefore, the relations between two such personages could not be considered friendly; but still appearances were kept up, and the next year, at a grand jousting before the king in Madrid, where Mendoza offered himself against all comers, the Constable was one of his opponents; and after the encounter, they feasted together merrily and in all honor.[612] Indeed, the troubles between them were inconsiderable till 1448 and 1449, when the hard proceedings of the Constable against others of the friends and relations of Mendoza led him into a more formal opposition,[613] which in 1452 brought on a regular conspiracy between himself and two more of the leading nobles of the kingdom. The next year the favorite was sacrificed.[614] In the last scenes, however, of this extraordinary tragedy, the Marquis of Santillana seems to have had little share.