That so their loves, though fickle all and strange,
May, in their thousand changes, still together change?[770]
Boscan might, probably, have done more for the literature of his country than he did. His poetical talents were not, indeed, of the highest order; but he perceived the degradation into which Spanish poetry had fallen, and was persuaded that the way to raise it again was to give it an ideal character and classical forms such as it had not yet known. But to accomplish this, he adopted a standard not formed on the intimations of the national genius. He took for his models foreign masters, who, though more advanced than any he could find at home, were yet entitled to supremacy in no literature but their own, and could never constitute a safe foundation whereon to build a great and permanent school of Spanish poetry. Entire success, therefore, was impossible to him. He was able to establish in Spain the Italian eleven-syllable and iambic versification; the sonnet and canzone, as settled by Petrarch; Dante’s terza rima;[771] and Boccaccio’s and Ariosto’s flowing octaves;—all in better taste than any thing among the poets of his time and country, and all of them important additions to the forms of verse before known in Spain. But he could go no farther. The original and essential spirit of Italian poetry could no more be transplanted to Castile or Catalonia than to Germany or England.
But whatever were his purposes and plans for the advancement of the literature of his country, Boscan lived long enough to see them fulfilled, so far as they were ever destined to be; for he had a friend who cooperated with him in all of them from the first, and who, with a happier genius, easily surpassed him, and carried the best forms of Italian verse to a height they never afterwards reached in Spanish poetry. This friend was Garcilasso de la Vega, who yet died so young, that Boscan survived him several years.
Garcilasso was descended from an ancient family in the North of Spain, who traced back their ancestry to the age of the Cid, and who, from century to century, had been distinguished by holding some of the highest places in the government of Castile.[772] A poetical tradition says, that one of his forefathers obtained the name of “Vega” or Plain, and the motto of “Ave Maria” for his family arms, from the circumstance, that, during one of the sieges of Granada, he slew outright, before the face of both armies, a Moorish champion who had publicly insulted the Christian faith by dragging a banner inscribed with “Ave Maria” at his horse’s heels,—a tradition faithfully preserved in a fine old ballad, and forming the catastrophe of one of Lope de Vega’s plays.[773] But whether all this be true or not, Garcilasso bore a name honored on both sides of his house; for his mother was daughter and sole heir of Fernan Perez de Guzman, and his father was the ambassador of the Catholic sovereigns at Rome in relation to the troublesome affairs of Naples.
He was born at Toledo in 1503, and was educated there till he reached an age suitable for bearing arms. Then, as became his rank and pretensions, he was sent to court, and received his place in the armies that were already gaining so much glory for their country. When he was about twenty-seven years old, he married an Aragonese lady attached to the court of Eleanor, widow of the king of Portugal, who, in 1530, was in Spain on her way to become queen of France. From this time he seems to have been constantly in the wars which the Emperor was carrying on in all directions, and to have been much trusted by him, though his elder brother, Pedro, had been implicated in the troubles of the Comunidades, and compelled to escape from Spain as an outlawed rebel.[774]
In 1532 Garcilasso was at Vienna, and among those who distinguished themselves in the defeat of the Turkish expedition of Soliman, which that great sultan pushed to the very gates of the city. But while he was there, he was himself involved in trouble. He undertook to promote the marriage of one of his nephews with a lady of the Imperial household; and, urging his project against the pleasure of the Empress, not only failed, but was cast into prison on an island in the Danube, where he wrote the melancholy lines on his own desolation and on the beauty of the adjacent country, which pass as the third Cancion in his works.[775] The progress of events, however, not only soon brought his release, but raised him into higher favor than ever. In 1535 he was at the siege of Tunis,—when Charles the Fifth attempted to crush the Barbary powers by a single blow,—and there received two severe wounds, one on his head and the other in his arm.[776] His return to Spain is recorded in an elegy, written at the foot of Mount Ætna, and indicating that he came back by the way of Naples; a city which, from another poem addressed to Boscan, he seems to have visited once before.[777] At any rate, we know, though his present visit to Italy was a short one, that he was there, at some period, long enough to win the personal esteem and regard of Bembo and Tansillo.[778]
The very next year, however,—the last of his short life,—we find him again at the court of the Emperor, and engaged in the disastrous expedition into Provence. The army had already passed through the difficulties and dangers of the siege of Marseilles, and was fortunate enough not to be pursued by the cautious Constable de Montmorenci. But as they approached the town of Frejus, a small castle, on a commanding hill, defended by only fifty of the neighbouring peasantry, offered a serious annoyance to their farther passage. The Emperor ordered the slight obstacle to be swept from his path. Garcilasso, who had now a considerable command, advanced gladly to execute the Imperial requisition. He knew that the eyes of the Emperor, and indeed those of the whole army, were upon him; and, in the true spirit of knighthood, he was the first to mount the wall. But a well-directed stone precipitated him into the ditch beneath. The wound, which was on his head, proved mortal, and he died a few days afterwards, at Nice, in 1536, only thirty-three years old. His fate is recorded by Mariana, Sandoval, and the other national historians, among the important events of the time; and the Emperor, we are told, basely avenged it by putting to death all the survivors of the fifty peasantry, who had done no more than bravely defend their homes against a foreign invader.[779]
In a life so short and so crowded with cares and adventures we should hardly expect to find leisure for poetry. But, as he describes himself in his third Eclogue, Garcilasso seems to have hurried through the world,
Now seizing on the sword, and now the pen;[780]