Juzgara como agéna, o que este fuego, etc.
I know of no earlier instance of this precise rhyme, which is quite different from the lawless rhymes that sometimes broke the verses of the Minnesingers and Troubadours. Cervantes used it, nearly a century afterwards, in his “Cancion de Grisóstomo,” (Don Quixote, Parte I. c. 14,) and Pellicer, in his commentary on the passage, regards Cervantes as the inventor of it. Perhaps Garcilasso’s rhymes had escaped all notice; for they are not the subject of remark by his learned commentators. In English, instances of this peculiarity may be found occasionally amidst the riotous waste of rhymes in Southey’s “Curse of Kehama,” and in Italian they occur in Alfieri’s “Saul,” Act III. sc. 4. I do not remember to have seen them again in Spanish except in some décimas of Pedro de Salas, printed in 1638, and in the second jornada of the “Pretendiente al Reves” of Tirso de Molina, 1634. No doubt they occur elsewhere, but they are rare, I think.
[786] Francisco Sanchez—who was named at home El Brocense, because he was born at Las Brozas in Estremadura, but is known elsewhere as Sanctius, the author of the “Minerva,” and other works of learning—published his edition of Garcilasso at Salamanca, 1574, 18mo; a modest work, which has been printed often since. This was followed at Seville, in 1580, by the elaborate edition of Herrera, in 8vo, filling nearly seven hundred pages, chiefly with its commentary, which is so cumbersome, that it has never been reprinted, though it contains a good deal important, both to the history of Garcilasso, and to the elucidation of the earlier Spanish literature. Tamayo de Vargas was not satisfied with either of them, and published a commentary of his own at Madrid in 1622, 18mo, but it is of little worth. Perhaps the most agreeable edition of Garcilasso is one published, without its editor’s name, in 1765, by the Chevalier Joseph Nicolas de Azara; long the ambassador of Spain at Rome, and at the head of what was most distinguished in the intellectual society of that capital. In English, Garcilasso was made known by J. H. Wiffen, who, in 1823, published at London, in 8vo, a translation of all his works, prefixing a Life and an Essay on Spanish Poetry; but the translation is constrained, and fails in the harmony that so much distinguishes the original, and the dissertation is heavy and not always accurate in its statement of facts.
[787] Don Quixote, (Parte II. c. 58,) after leaving the Duke and Duchess, finds a party about to represent one of Garcilasso’s Eclogues, at a sort of fête champêtre.
[788] I notice that the allusions to Garcilasso by Cervantes are chiefly in the latter part of his life; namely, in the second part of his Don Quixote, in his Comedias, his Novelas, and his “Persiles y Sigismunda,” as if his admiration were the result of his matured judgment. More than once he calls him “the prince of Spanish poets”; but this title, which can be traced back to Herrera, and has been continued down to our own times, has, perhaps, rarely been taken literally.
[789] How decidedly Garcilasso rejected the Spanish poetry written before his time can be seen, not only by his own example, but by his letter prefixed to Boscan’s translation of Castiglione, where he says that he holds it to be a great benefit to the Spanish language to translate into it things really worthy to be read; “for,” he adds, “I know not what ill luck has always followed us, but hardly any body has written any thing in our tongue worthy of that trouble.” It may be noted, on the other hand, that scarcely a word or phrase used by Garcilasso has ceased to be accounted pure Castilian;—a remark that can be extended, I think, to no writer so early. His language lives as he does, and, in no small degree, because his success has consecrated it. The word desbañar, in his second Eclogue, is, perhaps, the only exception to this remark.
[790] Eleven years after the publication of the works of Boscan and Garcilasso, Hernando de Hozes, in the Preface to his “Triumfos de Petrarca,” (Medina del Campo, 1554, 4to,) says, with much truth: “Since Garcilasso de la Vega and Juan Boscan introduced Tuscan measures into our Spanish language, every thing earlier, written or translated, in the forms of verse then used in Spain, has so much lost reputation, that few now care to read it, though, as we all know, some of it is of great value.” If this opinion had continued to prevail, Spanish literature would not have become what it now is.
[791] Goujet, Bibliothèque Française, Paris, 1745, 12mo, Tom. IX. pp. 372-380.
[792] It is something like the well-known German poem “Theuerdank,” which was devoted to the adventures of Maximilian I. up to the time when he married Mary of Burgundy, and, like that, owes some of its reputation to the bold engravings with which its successive editions were ornamented. One of the best of the Cavallero Determinado is the Plantiniana, Anvers, 1591, 8vo. The account of the part—earlier unsuspected—borne by the Emperor in the composition of the Cavallero Determinado is found on pp. 15 and 16 of the “Lettres sur la Vie Intérieure de l’Empereur Charles Quint, par Guillaume Van Male, Gentilhomme de sa Chambre, publiées pour la première fois par le Baron de Reiffenberg, Bruxelles, Société des Bibliophiles Belgiques, à Bruxelles, 1843,” 4to; a very curious collection of thirty-one Latin letters, that often contain strange details of the infirmities of the Emperor from 1550 to 1555. Their author, Van Male, or Malinæus as he was called in Latin, and Malinez in Spanish, was one of the needy Flemings who sought favor at the court of Charles V. Being ill treated by the Duke of Alva, who was his first patron; by Avila y Zuñiga, whose Commentaries he translated into Latin, in order to purchase his regard; and by the Emperor, to whom he rendered many kind and faithful services, he was, like many others who had come to Spain with similar hopes, glad to return to Flanders as poor as he came. He died in 1560. He was an accomplished and simple-hearted scholar, and deserved a better fate than to be rewarded for his devotion to the Imperial humors by a present of Acuña’s manuscript, which Avila had the malice to assure the Emperor would be well worth five hundred gold crowns to the suffering man of letters;—a remark to which the Emperor replied by saying, “William will come rightfully by the money; he has sweat hard at the work,”—“Bono jure fructus ille ad Gulielmum redeat; ut qui plurimum in illo opere sudârit.” Of the Emperor’s personal share in the version of the Chevalier Délibéré Van Male gives the following account (Jan. 13, 1551):—“Cæsar maturat editionem libri, cui titulus erat Gallicus,—Le Chevalier Délibéré. Hunc per otium a seipso traductum tradidit Ferdinando Acunæ, Saxonis custodi, ut ab eo aptaretur ad numeros rithmi Hispanici; quæ res cecidit felicissimè. Cæsari, sine dubio, debetur primaria traductionis industria, cùm non solùm linguam, sed et carmen et vocum significantiam mirè expressit,” etc. Epist. vi.
A version of the Chevalier Délibéré was also made by Gerónimo de Urrea, and was printed in 1555. I have never seen it.