But an Italian school was not introduced into Spanish literature without a contest. We cannot, perhaps, tell who first broke ground against it, as an unprofitable and unjustifiable innovation; but Christóval de Castillejo, a gentleman of Ciudad Rodrigo, was the most efficient of its early opponents. He was attached, from the age of fifteen, to the person of Ferdinand, the younger brother of Charles the Fifth, and subsequently Emperor of Germany; passing a part of his life in Austria, as secretary to that prince, and ending it, in extreme old age, as a Carthusian monk, at the convent of Val de Iglesias, near Toledo. But wherever he lived, Castillejo wrote verses, and showed no favor to the new school. He attacked it in many ways, but chiefly by imitating the old masters in their villancicos, canciones, glosas, and the other forms and measures they adopted, though with a purer and better taste than they had generally shown.
Some of his poetry was written as early as 1540 and 1541; and, except the religious portion, which fills the latter part of the third and last of the three books into which his works are divided, it has generally a fresh and youthful air. Facility and gayety are, perhaps, its most prominent, though certainly not its highest, characteristics. Some of his love-verses are remarkable for their tenderness and grace, especially those addressed to Anna; but he shows the force and bent of his talent rather when he deals with practical life, as he does in his bitter discussion concerning the court; in a dialogue between his pen and himself; in a poem on Woman; and in a letter to a friend, asking counsel about a love affair;—all of which are full of living sketches of the national manners and feelings. Next to these, perhaps, some of his more fanciful pieces, such as his “Transformation of a Drunkard into a Mosquito,” are the most characteristic of his light-hearted nature.
But on every occasion where he finds an opening, or can make one, he attacks the imitators of the Italians, whom he contemptuously calls “Petrarquistas.” Once, he devotes to them a regular satire, which he addresses “to those who give up the Castilian measures and follow the Italian,” calling out Boscan and Garcilasso by name, and summoning Juan de Mena, Sanchez de Badajoz, Naharro, and others of the elder poets, to make merry with him, at the expense of the innovators. Almost everywhere he shows a genial temperament, and sometimes indulges himself in a freer tone than was thought beseeming at the time when he lived; in consequence of which, his poetry, though much circulated in manuscript, was forbidden by the Inquisition; so that all we now possess of it is a selection, which, by a sort of special favor, was exempted from censure, and permitted to be printed in 1573.[796]
Another of those who maintained the doctrines and wrote in the measures of the old school was Antonio de Villegas, whose poems, though written before 1551, were not printed till 1565. The Prólogo, addressed to the book, with instructions how it should bear itself in the world, reminds us sometimes of “The Soul’s Errand,” but is more easy and less poetical. The best poems of the volume are, indeed, of this sort, light and gay; rather running into pretty quaintnesses than giving token of deep feeling. The longer among them, like those on Pyramus and Thisbe, and on the quarrel between Ulysses and Ajax, are the least interesting. But the shorter pieces are many of them very agreeable. One to the Duke of Sesa, the descendant of Gonzalvo of Córdova, and addressed to him as he was going to Italy, where Cervantes served under his leading, is fortunate, from its allusion to his great ancestor. It begins thus:—
Go forth to Italy, great chief;
It is thy fated land,
Sown thick with deeds of brave emprise
By that ancestral hand
Which cast its seeds so widely there,
That, as thou marchest on,