From this point, therefore, the poem becomes a confused gallery of mythological and historical portraits, arranged, as in the “Paradiso” of Dante, according to the order of the seven planets.[652] They have generally little merit, and are often shadowed forth very indistinctly. The best sketches are those of personages who lived in the poet’s own time or country; some drawn with courtly flattery, like the king’s and the Constable’s; others with more truth, as well as more skill, like those of the Marquis of Villena, Juan de Merlo, and the young Dávalos, whose premature fate is recorded in a few lines of unwonted power and tenderness.[653]
The story told most in detail is that of the Count de Niebla, who, in 1436, at the siege of Gibraltar, sacrificed his own life in a noble attempt to save that of one of his dependants; the boat in which the Count might have been rescued being too small to save the whole of the party, who thus all perished together in a flood-tide. This disastrous event, and especially the self-devotion of Niebla, who was one of the principal nobles of the kingdom, and at that moment employed on a daring expedition against the Moors, are recorded in the chronicles of the age, and introduced by Juan de Mena in the following characteristic stanzas:[654]—
And he who seems to sit upon that bark,
Invested by the cruel waves, that wait
And welter round him to prepare his fate,—
His and his bold companions’, in their dark
And watery abyss;—that stately form
Is Count Niebla’s, he whose honored name,
More brave than fortunate, has given to fame
The very tide that drank his life-blood warm.