[849] Herrera’s praises of Seville and the Guadalquivir sufficiently betray his origin, so constant are they. They are, too, sometimes among the happy specimens of his verse; for instance, in the ode in honor of St. Ferdinand, who rescued Seville from the Moors, and in the elegy, “Bien debes asconder sereno cielo.”
[850] Navarrete, Vida de Cervantes, 1819, p. 447. The date of Herrera’s death is given on the sure authority of some MS. notes of Pacheco, his friend, published in the Semanario Pintoresco, 1845, p. 299; before which it was unknown. These notes are taken from an interesting MS. which seems to have been the rough and imperfect draft of the “Imágines” and “Elogia Virorum Illustrium,” which Antonio (Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 456) says Pacheco gave to the well-known Count Duke Olivares. They are in the Semanario Erudito, 1844, pp. 374, etc. See also Navarrete, Vida de Cervantes, pp. 536-537. Pacheco was a good painter, and Cean Bermudez (Diccionario, Tom. IV. p. 3) gives a life of him. He was a man of some learning, and entered into a controversy with Quevedo on the question of making Santa Teresa a copatroness of Spain with Santiago, which Quevedo resisted; besides which, in 1649, he published in 4to, at Seville, his “Arte de la Pintura, su Antiguedad y Grandezas,” a rare work, praised by Cean Bermudez, which I have never seen. Pacheco died in 1654. Sedano (Parnaso Español, Tom. III. p. 117, and Tom. VII. p. 92) gives two epigrams of Pacheco, which are connected with his art, and which Sedano praises, I think, more than they deserve to be praised.
[851] Pacheco’s edition is accompanied with a fine portrait of the author from a picture by the editor, which has often been engraved since.
[852] “In our Spain, beyond all comparison, Garcilasso stands first,” he says, (p. 409), and repeats the same opinion often elsewhere.
[853] The edition of Fernandez, the most complete of all, and twice printed, is in the fourth and fifth volumes of his “Poesías Castellanas.” The longer poems of Herrera, which we know only by their unpromising titles, are “The Battle of the Giants,” “The Rape of Proserpine,” “The Amadis,” and “The Loves of Laurino and Cærona.” Perhaps we have reason to regret the loss of his unpublished Eclogues and “Castilian Verses,” which last may have been in the old Castilian measures. In 1572, he published a descriptive account of the war of Cyprus and the battle of Lepanto, and, in 1592, a Life of Sir Thomas More, taken from the Latin “Lives of the Three Thomases,” by Stapleton, the obnoxious English Papist. (Wood’s Athenæ, ed. Bliss, Tom. I. p. 671.) A History of Spain, said by Rioja to have been finished by Herrera about 1590, is probably lost.
[854] In some remarks by the Licentiate Enrique de Duarte, prefixed to the edition of Herrera’s poetry printed in 1619, he says, that, a few days after Herrera’s death, a bound volume, containing all his poetical works, prepared by himself for the press, was destroyed, and that his scattered manuscripts would probably have shared the same fate, if they had not been carefully collected by Pacheco.
[855] In his commentary on Garcilasso he says, “The sonnet is the most beautiful form of composition in Spanish and Italian poetry, and the one that demands the most art in its construction and the greatest grace.” p. 66.
[856] The lady to whom Herrera dedicated his love, in a spirit of pure and Platonic affection, little known to Spanish poetry, is said to have been the Countess of Gelves.
[857] There is a book on this subject which should not be entirely overlooked in a history of Spanish literature. It is an account of a pastry-cook of Madrigal, who, seventeen years after the rout in Africa, passed himself off in Spain as Don Sebastian, and induced Anna of Austria, a cousin of that monarch and a nun, to give him rich jewels, which led to the detection of the fraud. The story is interesting and well told, and was first printed in 1595, at Cadiz, under the title of “A History of Gabriel de Espinosa, the Pastry-cook of Madrigal, who pretended to be King Don Sebastian of Portugal.” Of course, Philip II. did not deal gently with one who made such pretensions to the crown he himself had clutched, or with any of his abettors. The pastry-cook and a monk on whom he had imposed his fictions were both hanged, after undergoing the usual appliances of racks and tortures; and the poor princess was degraded from her rank, and shut up in a conventual cell for life. There is an anonymous play of small merit, which seems to have been written in the time of Philip IV., and is entitled “El Pastelero de Madrigal.”