Some other poets in the ancient Valencian have been mentioned, as Juan Roiz de Corella, (Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 62,) a friend of the unhappy Prince Carlos de Viana; two or three, by no means without merit, who remain anonymous (Fuster, Tom. I. pp. 284-293); and several who joined in a certamen at Valencia, in 1498, in honor of St. Christopher (Ibid., pp. 296, 297). But the attempt to press into the service and to place in the thirteenth century the manuscript in the Escurial containing the poems of Sta. María Egypciaca and King Apollonius, already referred to (ante, [p. 24]) among the earliest Castilian poems, is necessarily a failure. Ibid., p. 284.
[559] Cancionero General, 1573, f. 251, and elsewhere.
[560] Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 61. Fuster, Tom. I. p. 54. Cancionero General, 1573, ff. 241, 251, 316, 318. Cerdá’s notes to Polo’s Diana, 1802, p. 304. Viñoles, in the Prólogo to the translation of the Latin Chronicle noticed on p. 216, says, “He has ventured to stretch out his rash hand and put it into the pure, elegant, and gracious Castilian, which, without falsehood or flattery, may, among the many barbarous and savage dialects of our own Spain, be called Latin-sounding and most elegant.” Suma de Todas las Crónicas, Valencia, 1510, folio, f. 2.
[561] The religious poems of Tallante begin, I believe, all the Cancioneros Generales, from 1511 to 1573.
[562] Cancionero General, 1573, ff. 238, 248, 300, 301. Fuster, Tom. I. p. 65; and Cerdá’s notes to Gil Polo’s Diana, p. 306.
[563] Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 102. Fuster, Tom. I. p. 87. Diana de Polo, ed. Cerdá, 326. Cancionero General, 1573, ff. 185, 222, 225, 228, 230, 305-307.
[564] His Works were first printed with the following title: “La Armonía del Parnas mes numerosa en las Poesías varias del Atlant del Cel Poétic, lo Dr. Vicent Garcia” (Barcelona, 1700, 4to, 201 pp.). There has been some question about the proper date of this edition, and therefore I give it as it is in my copy. (See Torres Amat, Memorias, pp. 271-274.) It consists chiefly of lyrical poetry, sonnets, décimas, redondillas, ballads, etc.; but at the end is a drama called “Santa Barbara,” in three short jornadas, with forty or fifty personages, some allegorical and some supernatural, and the whole as fantastic as any thing of the age that produced it. Another edition of Garcia’s Works was printed at Barcelona in 1840, and a notice of him occurs in the Semanario Pintoresco, 1843, p. 84.
[565] The Valencian has always remained a sweet dialect. Cervantes praises it for its “honeyed grace” more than once. See the second act of the “Gran Sultana,” and the opening of the twelfth chapter in the third book of “Persiles and Sigismunda.” Mayans y Siscar loses no occasion of honoring it; but he was a native of Valencia, and full of Valencian prejudices.
The literary history of the kingdom of Valencia—both that of the period when its native dialect prevailed, and that of the more recent period during which the Castilian has enjoyed the supremacy—has been illustrated with remarkable diligence and success. The first person who devoted himself to it was Josef Rodriguez, a learned ecclesiastic, who was born in its capital in 1630, and died there in 1703, just at the moment when his “Biblioteca Valentina” was about to be issued from the press, and when, in fact, all but a few pages of it had been printed. But though it was so near to publication, a long time elapsed before it finally appeared; for his friend, Ignacio Savalls, to whom the duty of completing it was intrusted, and who at once busied himself with his task, died, at last, in 1746, without having quite accomplished it.
Meanwhile, however, copies of the imperfect work had got abroad, and one of them came into the hands of Vicente Ximeno, a Valencian, as well as Rodriguez, and, like him, interested in the literary history of his native kingdom. At first, Ximeno conceived the project of completing the work of his predecessor; but soon determined rather to use its materials in preparing on the same subject another and a larger one of his own, whose notices should come down to his own time. This he soon completed, and published it at Valencia, in 1747-49, in two volumes, folio, with the title of “Escritores de Valencia,”—not, however, so quickly that the Biblioteca of Rodriguez had not been fairly launched into the world, in the same city, in 1747, a few months before the first volume of Ximeno’s appeared.