The happiest part of the life of Lupercio was probably passed at Naples, where he went, in 1610, with the Count de Lemos, when that accomplished nobleman was made its viceroy, and seemed to be hardly less anxious to have poets about him than statesmen,—taking both the brothers, as part of his official suite, and not only giving Lupercio the post of Secretary of State and of War, but authorizing him to appoint his subordinates from among Spanish men of letters. But his life at Naples was short. In March, 1613, he died suddenly, and was buried with much solemnity by the Academy of the Oziosi, which he had himself helped to establish, and of which Manso, the friend of Tasso and of Milton, was then the head.
Bartolomé, who, like his brother, bore the name of Leonardo, was educated for the Church, and, under the patronage of the Duke of Villahermosa, early received a living in Aragon, which finally determined his position in society. But, until 1610, when he went to Naples, he lived a great deal at the University of Salamanca, where he was devoted to literary pursuits and prepared his history of the recent conquest of the Moluccas, which was printed in 1609. At Naples, he was a principal personage in the poetical court of the Count de Lemos, and showed, as did others with whom he was associated, a pleasant facility in acting dramas, that were improvisated as they were performed. At Rome, too, he was favorably known and patronized; and before his return home in 1616, he was made chronicler of Aragon; a place in which he succeeded his brother, and which he continued to enjoy till his own death, in 1631.
There is little in what was most fortunate in the career of these two remarkable brothers that can serve to distinguish them, except the different lengths of their lives and the different amounts of their works; for not only were both of them poets and possessed of intellectual endowments able to command general respect, but both had the good fortune to rise to positions in the world which gave them a wide influence, and enabled them to become patrons of men of letters, some of whom were their superiors. But both are now seldom mentioned, except for a volume of poetry, chiefly lyrical, published in 1634, after their deaths, by a son of Lupercio. It consists, he says, of such of his father’s and his uncle’s poems as he had been able to collect, but by no means of all they had written; for his father had destroyed most of his manuscripts just before he died; and his uncle, though he had given about twenty of his poems to Espinosa in 1605, had not, it is apparent, been careful to preserve what had been only an amusement of his leisure hours, rather than a serious occupation.
Such as it is, however, this collection of their poems shows the same resemblance in their talents and tastes that was apparent in their lives. Italy, a country in which their family had its origin, where they had themselves lived, and some of whose poets they had familiarly known, seems almost always present to their thoughts as they write. Nor is Horace often absent. His philosophical spirit, his careful, but rich, versification, and his tempered enthusiasm, are the characteristic merits to which the Argensolas aspired alike in their formal odes and in the few of their poems that take the freer and more national forms. The elder shows, on the whole, more of original power; but he left only half as many poems, by which to judge his merits, as his brother did. The younger is more graceful, and finishes his compositions with more care and judgment. Both, notwithstanding they were Aragonese, wrote with entire purity of style, so that Lope de Vega said “it seemed as if they had come from Aragon to reform Castilian verse.” Both, therefore, are to be placed high in the list of Spanish lyric poets;—next, perhaps, after the great masters;—a rank which we most readily assign them, when we are considering the shorter poems addressed by the elder to the lady he afterwards married, and the purity of manner and sustained dignity of feeling which mark the longer compositions of each.[907]
Among those who followed the Argensolas, the earliest of their successful imitators was probably Jauregui, a Sevilian gentleman, descended from an old Biscayan family, and born about 1570. Having a talent for painting, as well as poetry,—a fact we learn in many ways, and among the rest from an epigrammatic sonnet of Lope de Vega,—he went to Rome and devoted himself to the study of the art to which, at first, he seems to have given his life. But still poetry drew him away from the path he had chosen. In 1607, while at Rome, he published a translation of the “Aminta” of Tasso, and from that time was numbered among the Spanish poets who were valued at home and abroad. On his return to Spain, he seems to have gone to Madrid, where, heralded by a good reputation, he was kindly received at court. This was probably as early as 1613, for Cervantes in that year mentioned in his “Tales” a portrait of himself, painted, as he says, “by the famous Jauregui.”
In 1618, however, he was again in Seville, and published a collection of his works; but in 1624 his “Orfeo” appeared at Madrid,—a poem in five short cantos, on the story of Orpheus. It is written with much less purity of style than might have been expected from one who afterwards denounced the extravagances of Góngora. Still, it attracted so lively an interest, that Montalvan thought it worth while to publish another on the same subject, in competition with it, as soon as possible;—a rivalship in which he was openly abetted by his great master, Lope de Vega.[908] Both poems seem to have been well received, and both authors continued to enjoy the favor of the capital till their deaths, which happened at about the same time; that of Jauregui as late as 1640, when he finished a too free translation, or rather a presumptuous and distasteful rearrangement, of Lucan’s “Pharsalia.”
The reputation of Jauregui rests on the volume of poems he himself published in 1618. The translation of Tasso’s “Aminta,” with which it opens, is elaborately corrected from the edition he had previously printed at Rome, without being always improved by the changes he introduced. But, in each of its forms, it is probably the most carefully finished and beautiful translation in the Spanish language; marked by great ease and facility in its versification, and especially by the charming lyrical tone that runs with such harmony and sweetness through the Italian.
Jauregui’s original poems are few, and now and then betray the same traces of submission to the influence of Góngora that are to be seen in his “Orfeo” and “Pharsalia.” But the more lyrical portions—which, except those on religious subjects, have a very Italian air—are almost entirely free from such faults. The Ode on Luxury is noble and elevated; and the silva on seeing his mistress bathing, more cautiously managed than the similar scene in Thomson’s “Summer,” is admirable in its diction, and betrays in its beautiful picturesqueness something of its author’s skill and refinement in the kindred art to which he had devoted himself. His sonnets and shorter pieces are less successful.[909]
Another of the followers of the Argensolas—and one who boasted that he had trodden in their footsteps from the days of his boyhood, when Bartolomé had been pointed out to his young admiration in the streets of Madrid—was Estévan Manuel de Villegas.[910] He was born at Naxera, in 1596, and was educated partly at court and partly at Salamanca, where he studied the law. After 1617, or certainly as early as 1626, when he was married, he almost entirely abandoned letters, and gave himself up to such profitable occupations connected with his profession as would afford subsistence to those dependent on his labors. He, however, found leisure to prepare for publication a number of learned dissertations on ancient authors; to make considerable progress in a professional commentary on the “Codex Theodosianus”; and to publish, in 1665, as a consolation for his own sorrows, a translation of Boethius, which, besides its excellent version of the poetical parts, is among the good specimens of Castilian prose. But he remained, during his whole life, unpatronized and poor, and died in 1669, an unfortunate and unhappy man.[911]
The gay and poetical part of the life of Villegas—the period when he presumptuously announced himself as the rising sun, and attacked Cervantes, thinking to please the Argensolas[912]—began very early, and was soon darkened by the cares and troubles of the world. He tells us himself that he wrote much of his poetry when he was only fourteen years old; and he certainly published nearly the whole of it when he was hardly twenty-one.[913] And yet there are few volumes in the Spanish language that afford surer proofs of a poetical temperament. It is divided into two parts. The first contains versions of a number of Odes from the First Book of Horace, and a translation of the whole of Anacreon, followed by imitations of Anacreon’s manner, on subjects relating to their author. The second contains satires and elegies, which are really epistles; idyls in the Italian ottava rima; sonnets, in the manner of Petrarch; and “Latinas,” as he calls them, from the circumstance that they are written in the measures of Roman verse.