And then sat down behind a screen,
And talked it over. Quite precise,
They took each other’s best advice,
Whether to eat the spit or no?
“And did they eat it?” “Sir, I trow,
They did not! They were honest things,
Who had a conscience, and knew how it stings.”[350]
Samaniego was not the only person who, without belonging to the society of Moratin and his friends, coöperated with them in their efforts to encourage a better tone in the literature of their country. Among those who, from a similar impulse, but with less success, took the same direction, were Arroyal, who, in 1784, published a collection of poems, which he calls Odes, but which are oftener epigrams; and Montengon, a Jesuit, who, after the expulsion of his Order from Spain, began, in 1786, with his “Eusebio,” a work on education, partly in imitation of the “Télémaque,” and then went on rapidly with a prose epic called “Rodrigo,” a volume of Odes, and several other works, written with little talent, and showing by their inaccuracies of style that their author had been an exile in Italy till his mother tongue had become strange to him. To these should be added Gregorio de Salas, a quiet ecclesiastic, who wrote odes, fables, and other trifles, that were several times printed after 1790; Ignacio de Meras, a courtier of the worst days of Charles the Fourth, whose worthless dramas and miscellaneous poetry appeared in 1792; and the Count de Noroña, a soldier and diplomatist, who, besides a dull epic on the separation of the Arabian empire in Spain from that of the East, printed, in 1799-1800, two volumes of verse so light, that they procured for him sometimes the title of the Spanish Dorat. But all these writers only showed a constantly increasing disposition to fall more and more into the feebler French school of the eighteenth century; and while none of them had the talent of the few active spirits collected at the Fonda de San Sebastian in Madrid, none certainly exercised the sort of influence they did on the poetry of their time.[351]