A poetical spirit runs through the whole. The translations are generally free, but more than commonly true to the genius of their originals. The “Latinas” are curious. They fill only a few pages; but, except slight specimens of the ancient measures in the choruses of the two tragedies of Bermudez, forty years before, they are the first and the only attempt worthy of notice, to introduce into the Castilian those forms of verse which, a little before the time of Bermudez, had obtained some success in France, and which, a little later, our own Spenser sought to establish in English poetry.
But though Villegas did not succeed in this, he succeeded in his imitations of Anacreon. We seem, indeed, as we read them, to have the simple and joyous spirit of ancient festivity and love revived before us, with nothing, or almost nothing, of what renders that spirit offensive. The ode to a little bird whose nest had been robbed; one to himself, “Love and the Bee”; the imitation of “Ut flos in septis,” by Catullus; and, indeed, nearly every one of the smaller pieces that compose the third book of the first division, with several in the first book, are beautiful in their kind, and give such a faithful impression of the native sweetness of Anacreon as is not easily found elsewhere in modern literature. We close the volume of Villegas, therefore, with sincere regret that he, who, in his boyhood, could write poetry so beautiful,—poetry so imbued with the spirit of antiquity, and yet so full of the tenderness of modern feeling; so classically exact, and yet so fresh and natural,—should have survived its publication above forty years without finding an interval when the cares and disappointments of the world permitted him to return to the occupations that made his youth happy, and that have preserved his name for a posterity of which, when he first lisped in numbers, he could hardly have had a serious thought.[914]
We pass over Balbuena, whose best lyric poetry is found in his prose romance;[915] and Salas Barbadillo, who has scattered similar poetry through his various publications and collected more of it in his “Castilian Rhymes.”[916] Both of them flourished before 1630, and, like Polo,[917] whose talent lay chiefly in lighter compositions, and Rojas, who succeeded best in pastorals of a very lyric tone,[918] they lived at a time when Lope de Vega was pouring forth floods of verse, which were not only sufficient to determine the main current of the literature of the country, but to sweep along, undistinguished in its turbulent flood, the contributions of many a stream, smaller, indeed, than its own, but purer and more graceful.
Among these was the poetry of Francisco de Rioja, a native of Seville, who was born in 1600, and died in 1658. From the circumstance that he occupied a high place in the Inquisition, he might have counted on a shelter from the storms of state, if he had not connected himself too much with the Count Duke Olivares, whose fall drew after it that of nearly all who had shared in his intrigues, or sought the protection of his overshadowing patronage. But the disgrace of Rioja was temporary; and the latter part of his life, which he gave to letters at Seville, seems to have been as happy and fortunate as the first.
The amount of his poetry that has come down to us is small, but it is all valued and read. Some of his sonnets are uncommonly felicitous. So are his ode “To Riches,” imitated from Horace, and the corresponding one “To Poverty,” which is quite original. In that “To the Opening Year,” exhorting his young friend Fonseca, almost in the words of Pericles, not to lose the springtime out of his life, there is much tenderness and melancholy; a reflection, perhaps, of the regrets that he felt for mistakes in his own early and more ambitious career. But his chief distinction has generally come from an ode, full of sadness and genius, “On the Ruins of Italica,”—that Roman city, near Seville, which claims the honor of having given birth to Trajan, and which he celebrates with the enthusiasm of one whose childish fancy had been nourished by wandering among the remains of its decaying amphitheatre and fallen palaces. This distinction has, however, been contested; and the ode in question, or rather a part of it, has been claimed for Rodrigo Caro, known in his time rather as an antiquarian than as a poet, among whose unpublished works a sketch of it is found with the date of 1595, which, if genuine, carries the general conception, and at least one of the best stanzas, back to a period before the birth of Rioja.[919]
Among those who opposed the school of Góngora, and perhaps the person who, from his influence in society, could best have checked its power, if he had not himself been sometimes betrayed into its bad taste, was the Prince Borja y Esquilache. His titles—which are, in fact, corruptions of the great names borne by the Italian principalities of Borgia and Squillace—betray his origin, and explain some of his tendencies. But though, by a strange coincidence, he was great-grandson of Pope Alexander the Sixth, and grandson of one of the heads of the Order of the Jesuits, he was also descended from the old royal family of Aragon, and had a faithful Spanish heart. From his high rank, he easily found a high place in public affairs. He was distinguished both as a soldier and as a diplomatist; and at one time he rose to be viceroy of Peru, and administered its affairs during six years with wisdom and success.
But, like many others of his countrymen, he never forgot letters amidst the anxieties of public life; and, in fact, found leisure enough to write several volumes of poetry. Of these, the best portions are his lyrical ballads. His sonnets, too, are good, especially those in a gayer vein, and so are his madrigals, which, like that “To a Nightingale,” are often graceful and sometimes tender. In general, those of his shorter compositions which are a little epigrammatic in their tone and very simple in their language are the best. They belong to a class constantly reappearing in Spanish literature, of which the following may be taken as a favorable specimen:—
Ye little founts, that laughing flow
And frolic with the sands,
Say, whither, whither do ye go,