Gives outwardly no sign or mark,
Within, within, my sorrow lives.[21]
The number of such compositions, in their different serious forms, is great; but the number of the second kind—those in a lighter and livelier tone—is still greater. The Argensolas, Villegas, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, the Prince Esquilache, Rebolledo, and not a few others, wrote them with spirit and effect. Of all, however, who indulged in them, nobody devoted to their composition so much zeal, and on the whole obtained so much success, as Francisco de la Torre, who, though of the culto school, seemed able to shake off much of its influence, when he remembered that he was a fellow-countryman of Martial.
He took for the foundation of his humor the remarkable Latin epigrams of John Owen, the English Protestant, who died in 1622, and whose witty volume has been often translated and printed at home and abroad down to our own times;—a volume, it should be noted, so offensive to the Romish Church as to have been early placed on its Index Expurgatorius. But La Torre avoided whatever could give umbrage to the ecclesiastical authorities of his time, and, adding a great number of original epigrams quite as good as those he translated, made a collection that fills two volumes, the last of which was printed in 1682, after its author’s death.[22]
But though he wrote more good epigrams, and in a greater variety of forms, than any other individual Spaniard, he did not, perhaps, write the best or the most national; for a few of those that still remain anonymous, and a still smaller number by Rebolledo, seem to claim this distinction. Of the sort of wit frequently affected in these slight compositions the following is an example:—
Fair lady, when your beads you take,
I never doubt you pray;
Perhaps for my poor murdered sake,
Perhaps for yours, that slay.[23]
Rebolledo was sometimes happier than he is in this epigram, though rarely more national.