It is probably a satire on some event notorious at the time and long since forgotten; but however its origin may be explained, it is one of the best imitations extant of the Italian mock-heroics. It has, too, the rare merit of being short.[827]
Much better known than the Chrespina is the “Mosquea,” by Villaviciosa;—a rich and fortunate ecclesiastic, who was born at Siguenza in 1589, and died at Cuenca in 1658. The Mosquea, which is the war of the flies and the ants, was printed in 1615; but though the author lived so long afterwards, he left nothing else to mark the genius of which this poem gives unquestionable proof. It is, as may be imagined, an imitation of the “Batrachomyomachia,” attributed to Homer, and the storm in the third canto is taken, with some minuteness in the spirit of its parody, from the storm in the first book of the Æneid. Still the Mosquea is as original as the nature of such a poem requires it to be. It has, besides, a simple and well-constructed fable; and notwithstanding it is protracted to twelve cantos, the curiosity of the reader is sustained to the last.
A war breaks out in the midst of the festivities of a tournament in the capital city of the flies, which the false ants had chosen as a moment when they could advantageously interrupt the peace that had long subsisted between them and their ancient enemies. The heathen gods are introduced, as they are in the Iliad,—the other insects become allies in the great quarrel, after the manner of all heroic poems,—the neighbouring chiefs come in,—there is an Achilles on one side, and an Æneas on the other,—the characters of the principal personages are skilfully drawn and sharply distinguished,—and the catastrophe is a tremendous battle, filling the last two cantos, in which the flies are defeated and their brilliant leader made the victim of his own rashness. The faults of the poem are its pedantry and length. Its merits are the richness and variety of its poetical conceptions, the ingenious delicacy with which the minutest circumstances in the condition of its insect heroes are described, and the air of reality, which, notwithstanding the secret satire that is never entirely absent, is given to the whole by the seeming earnestness of its tone. It ends, precisely where it should, with the expiring breath of the principal hero.[828]
No other mock-heroic poem followed that of Villaviciosa during this period, except “The War of the Cats,” by Lope de Vega, who, in his ambition for universal conquest, seized on this, as he did on every other department of the national literature. But the “Gatomachia,” which is one of the very best of his efforts, has already been noticed. We turn, therefore, again to the true heroic poems, devoted to national subjects, whose current flows no less amply and gravely, down to the middle of the seventeenth century, than it did when it first began, and continues through its whole course no less characteristic of the national genius and temper than we have seen it in the poems on Charles the Fifth and his achievements.
The favorite hero of the next age, Don John of Austria, son of the Emperor, was the occasion of two poems, with which we naturally resume the examination of this curious series.[829] The first of them is on the battle of Lepanto, and was published in 1578, the year of Don John’s untimely death. The author, Cortereal, was a Portuguese gentleman of rank and fortune, who distinguished himself as the commander of an expedition against the infidels on the coasts of Africa and Asia, in 1571, and died before 1593; but, being tired of fame, passed the last twenty years of his life at Evora, and devoted himself to poetry and to the kindred arts of music and painting.
It was amidst the beautiful and romantic nature that surrounded him during the quiet conclusion of his bustling life, that he wrote three long poems;—two in Portuguese, which were soon translated into Spanish and published; and one, originally composed in Spanish, and entitled “The Most Happy Victory granted by Heaven to the Lord Don John of Austria, in the Gulf of Lepanto, over the Mighty Ottoman Armada.” It is in fifteen cantos of blank verse, and is dedicated to Philip the Second, who, contrary to his custom, acknowledged the compliment by a flattering letter. The poem opens with a dream brought to the Sultan from the infernal regions by the goddess of war, and inciting him to make an attack on the Christians; but excepting this, and the occasional use of similar machinery afterwards, it is merely a dull historical account of the war, ending with the great sea-fight itself, which is the subject of the last three cantos.[830]
The other contemporary poem on Don John of Austria was still more solemnly devoted to his memory. It was written by Juan Rufo Gutierrez, a person much trusted in the government of Córdova, and expressly sent by that city to Don John, whose service he seems never afterwards to have left. He was, as he tells us, especially charged by that prince to write his history, and received from him the materials for his task. The result, after ten years of labor, was a long chronicling poem called the “Austriada,” printed in 1584. It begins, in the first four cantos, with the rebellion of the Moors in the Alpuxarras; and then, after giving us the birth and education of Don John, as the general sent to subdue them, goes on with his subsequent life and adventures, and ends, in the twenty-fourth canto, with the battle of Lepanto and the promise of a continuation.
When it was thus far finished, which was not till after the death of the prince to whose glory it is dedicated, it was solemnly presented, both by the city of Córdova and by the Cortes of the kingdom, in separate letters, to Philip the Second, asking for it his especial favor, as for a work “that it seemed to them must last for many ages.” The king received it graciously, and gave the author five hundred ducats, regarding it, perhaps, with secret satisfaction, as a funeral monument to one whose life had been so brilliant that his death was not unwelcome. With such patronage, it soon passed through three editions; but it had no real merit, except in the skilful construction of its octave stanzas, and in some of its picturesque historical details, and was, therefore, soon forgotten.[831]
In the neighbourhood of the city of Leon there are,—or in the sixteenth century there were—three imperfect Roman inscriptions cut into the living rock; two of them referring to Curienus, a Spaniard, who had successfully resisted the Imperial armies in the reign of Domitian, and the third to Polma, a lady, whose marriage to her lover, Canioseco, is thus singularly recorded. On these inscriptions, Vezilla Castellanos, a native of the territory where the persons they commemorate are supposed to have lived, has constructed a romantic poem, in twenty-nine cantos, called “Leon in Spain,” which he published in 1586.
Its main subject, however, in the last fifteen cantos, is the tribute of a hundred damsels, which the usurper Mauregato covenanted by treaty to pay annually to the Moors, and which, by the assistance of the apostle Saint James, King Ramiro successfully refused to pay any longer. Castellanos, therefore, passes lightly over the long period intervening between the time of Domitian and that of the war of Pelayo, giving only a few sketches from its Christian history, and then, in the twenty-ninth canto, brings to a conclusion so much of his poem as relates to the Moorish tribute, without, however, reaching the ultimate limit he had originally proposed to himself. But it is long enough. Some parts of the Roman fiction are pleasing, but the rest of the poem shows that Castellanos is only what he calls himself in the Preface,—“A modest poetical historian, or historical poet; an imitator and apprentice of those who have employed poetry to record such memorable things as kindle the minds of men and raise them to a Christian and devout reverence for the saints, to an honorable exercise of arms, to the defence of God’s holy law, and to the loyal service of the king.”[832] If his poem have any subject, it is the history of the city of Leon.