Family of the Manriques. — Pedro, Rodrigo, Gomez, and Jorge. — The Coplas of the Last. — The Urreas. — Juan de Padilla.
Contemporary with all the authors we have just examined, and connected by ties of blood with several of them, was the family of the Manriques,—poets, statesmen, and soldiers,—men suited to the age in which they lived, and marked with its strong characteristics. They belonged to one of the oldest and noblest races of Castile; a race beginning with the Laras of the ballads and chronicles.[677] Pedro, the father of the first two to be noticed, was among the sturdiest opponents of the Constable Alvaro de Luna, and filled so large a space in the troubles of the time, that his violent imprisonment, just before he died, shook the country to its very foundations. At his death, however, in 1440, the injustice he had suffered was so strongly felt by all parties, that the whole court went into mourning for him, and the good Count Haro—the same in whose hands the honor and faith of the country had been put in pledge a year before at Tordesillas—came into the king’s presence, and, in a solemn scene well described by the chronicler of John the Second, obtained for the children of the deceased Manrique a confirmation of all the honors and rights of which their father had been wrongfully deprived.[678]
One of these children was Rodrigo Manrique, Count of Paredes, a bold captain, well known by the signal advantages he gained for his country over the Moors. He was born in 1416, and his name occurs constantly in the history of his time; for he was much involved, not only in the wars against the common enemy in Andalusia and Granada, but in the no less absorbing contests of the factions which then rent Castile and all the North. But, notwithstanding the active life he led, we are told that he found time for poetry, and one of his songs, by no means without merit, which has been preserved to us, bears witness to it. He died in 1476.[679]
His brother, Gomez Manrique, of whose life we have less distinct accounts, but whom we know to have been both a soldier and a lover of letters, has left us more proofs of his poetical studies and talent. One of his shorter pieces belongs to the reign of John the Second, and one of more pretensions comes into the period of the Catholic sovereigns; so that he lived in three different reigns.[680] At the request of Count Benevente, he at one time collected what he had written into a volume, which may still be extant, but has never been published.[681] The longest of his works, now known to exist, is an allegorical poem of twelve hundred lines on the death of his uncle, the Marquis of Santillana, in which the Seven Cardinal Virtues, together with Poetry and Gomez Manrique himself, appear and mourn over the great loss their age and country had sustained. It was written soon after 1458, and sent, with an amusingly pedantic letter, to his cousin, the Bishop of Calahorra, son of the Marquis of Santillana.[682] Another poem, addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella, which is necessarily to be dated as late as the year 1474, is a little more than half as long as the last, but, like that, is allegorical, and resorts to the same poor machinery of the Seven Virtues, who come this time to give counsel to the Catholic sovereigns on the art of government. It was originally preceded by a prose epistle, and was printed in 1482, so that it is among the earliest books that came from the Spanish press.[683]
These two somewhat long poems, with a few that are much shorter,—the best of which is on the bad government of a town where he lived,—fill up the list of what remain to us of their author’s works. They are found in the Cancioneros printed from time to time during the sixteenth century, and thus bear witness to the continuance of the regard in which he was long held. But, except a few passages, where he speaks in a natural tone, moved by feelings of personal affection, none of his poetry can now be read with pleasure; and, in some instances, the Latinisms in which he indulges, misled probably by Juan de Mena, render the lines where they occur quite ridiculous.[684]
Jorge Manrique is the last of this chivalrous family that comes into the literary history of his country. He was the son of Rodrigo, Count of Paredes, and seems to have been a young man of an uncommonly gentle cast of character, yet not without the spirit of adventure that belonged to his ancestors,—a poet full of natural feeling, when the best of those about him were almost wholly given to metaphysical conceits, and to what was then thought a curious elegance of style. We have, indeed, a considerable number of his lighter verses, chiefly addressed to the lady of his love, which are not without the coloring of his time, and remind us of the poetry on similar subjects produced a century later in England, after the Italian taste had been introduced at the court of Henry the Eighth.[685] But the principal poem of Manrique the younger is almost entirely free from affectation. It was written on the death of his father, which occurred in 1476, and is in the genuinely old Spanish measure and manner. It fills about five hundred lines, divided into forty-two coplas or stanzas, and is called, with a simplicity and directness worthy of its own character, “The Coplas of Manrique,” as if it needed no more distinctive name.
Nor does it. Instead of being a loud exhibition of his sorrows, or, what would have been more in the spirit of the age, a conceited exhibition of his learning, it is a simple and natural complaint of the mutability of all earthly happiness; the mere overflowing of a heart filled with despondency at being brought suddenly to feel the worthlessness of what it has most valued and pursued. His father occupies hardly half the canvas of the poem, and some of the stanzas devoted more directly to him are the only portion of it we could wish away. But we everywhere feel—before its proper subject is announced quite as much as afterwards—that its author has just sustained some loss, which has crushed his hopes, and brought him to look only on the dark and discouraging side of life. In the earlier stanzas he seems to be in the first moments of his great affliction, when he does not trust himself to speak out concerning its cause; when his mind, still brooding in solitude over his sorrows, does not even look round for consolation. He says, in his grief,—
Our lives are rivers, gliding free
To that unfathomed, boundless sea,
The silent grave;