In peace away.
An edition of Castilla’s very rare volume may have been printed about 1536, when it was licensed; but I have never seen it, nor any notice of it. The one of which I have a copy was printed at Zaragoza, 4to, lit. got., 1552; and I believe there is one of Alcalá, either in 1554 or 1564, 8vo.
The poetry of Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, who was Regidor of Madrid, and a member of the Cortes of 1544, is, perhaps, more rare than that of Castilla, and is contained in a small volume printed at Alcalá in 1550, and entitled “Buen Placer trovado en treze discantes de quarta rima Castellana segun imitacion de trobas Francesas,” etc. It consists of thirteen discourses on a happy life, its means and motives, all written in stanzas of four lines each, which their author calls French, I suppose, because they are longer lines than those in the old national measures, and rhymed alternately,—the rhymes of one stanza running into the next. At the end is a Canto Real, as it is called, on a verse in the Psalms, composed in the same manner; and several smaller poems, one of which is a kind of religious villancico, and four of them sonnets. The tone of the whole is didactic, and its poetical value small. I cite eight lines, as a specimen of its peculiar manner and rhymes:—
Errado va quien busca ser contento
En mal plazer mortal, que como heno
Se seca y passa como humo en viento,
De vanos tragos de ayre muy relleno.
Quando las negras velas van en lleno
Del mal plazer, villano peligroso,
De buen principio y de buen fin ageno,