They are divided into four books. The first consists of a small number of poems in what are called coplas Españolas, or what he himself elsewhere terms “the Castilian manner.” These are his early efforts, made before his acquaintance with Navagiero. They are villancicos, canciones, and coplas, in the short national verses, and seem as if they might have come out of the old Cancioneros, in which, indeed, two of them are to be found.[768] Their merit is not great; but, amidst their ingenious conceits, there is sometimes a happiness and grace of expression rarely granted to the poets of the same school in that or the preceding century.
The second and third books, constituting by far the larger part of the volume, are composed entirely of poems in the Italian measure. They consist of ninety-three sonnets and nine canzones; the long poem on Hero and Leander, in blank verse, already mentioned; an elegy and two didactic epistles, in terza rima; and a half-narrative, half-allegorical poem, in one hundred and thirty-five octave stanzas. It is not necessary to go beyond such a mere enumeration of the contents of these two books to learn, that, at least so far as their forms are concerned, they have nothing to do with the elder national Castilian poetry. The sonnets and the canzones especially are obvious imitations of Petrarch, as we can see in the case of the two beginning, “Gentil Señora mia,” and “Claros y frescos rios,” which are largely indebted to two of the most beautiful and best-known canzones of the lover of Laura.[769] In most of these poems, however, and amidst a good deal of hardness of manner, a Spanish tone and spirit are perceptible, which rescue them, in a great degree, from the imputation of being copies. Boscan’s colors are here laid on with a bolder hand than those of his Italian master, and there is an absence of that delicate and exact finish, both in language and style, which, however charming in his models, would hardly be possible in the most skilful Spanish imitations.
The elegy, which is merely entitled “Capitolo,” has more conceits and learning in it than become its subject, and approaches nearer to Boscan’s first manner than any of his later poems. It is addressed to his lady-love; but, notwithstanding its defects, it contains long passages of tenderness and simple beauty that will always be read with pleasure. Of the two epistles, the first is poor and affected; but that addressed to the old statesman, poet, and soldier, Diego de Mendoza, is much in the tone and manner of Horace,—acute, genial, and full of philosophy.
But the most agreeable and original of Boscan’s works is the last of them all,—“The Allegory.” It opens with a gorgeous description of the Court of Love, and with the truly Spanish idea of a corresponding and opposing Court of Jealousy; but almost the whole of the rest consists of an account of the embassy of two messengers from the first of these courts to two ladies of Barcelona who had refused to come beneath its empire, and to persuade whom to submission a speech of the ambassador is given that fills nearly half the poem, and ends it somewhat abruptly. No doubt, the whole was intended as a compliment to the two ladies, in which the story is of little consequence. But it is a pleasing and airy trifle, in which its author has sometimes happily hit the tone of Ariosto, and at other times reminds us of the Island of Love in the “Lusiad,” though Boscan preceded Camoens by many years. Occasionally, too, he has a moral delicacy, more refined than Petrarch’s, though perhaps suggested by that of the great Italian; such a delicacy as he shows in the following stanza, and two or three preceding and following it, in which the ambassador of Love exhorts the two ladies of Barcelona to submit to his authority, by urging on them the happiness of a union founded in a genuine sympathy of tastes and feeling:—
For is it not a happiness most pure,
That two fond hearts can thus together melt,
And each the other’s sorrows all endure,
While still their joys as those of one are felt;
Even causeless anger of support secure,
And pardons causeless in one spirit dealt;