Our palace, like the old ark, must shelter all:
Confusion, as of Babylon the Great,
Is round us, and the faith of Spain, oppress'd
By fine State-reason, trembles to its fall."
This expresses—much more clearly than the Gloria de Niquea—the true feeling of Góngora and his circle towards Steenie and Baby Charles.
Less nervous and energetic, but not less fantastic than Villamediana's worst extravagances, are the Obras póstumas divinas y humanas (1641) of Hortensio Félix Paravicino y Arteaga (1580-1633), whose praises were sung by Lope:—
"Divine Hortensio, whose exalted strain,
Sweet, pure, and witty, censure cannot wound,
The Cyril and the Chrysostom of Spain."
The divine Hortensio was court-preacher to Felipe IV., and enchanted his congregations by preaching in the culto style. His verses exaggerate Góngora's worst faults, and are disfigured by fulsome flattery of his leader, before whom, as he says, he is dumb with admiration. As thus:—"May my offering in gracious cloud, in equal wealth of fragrance, bestrew thine altars." Paravicino, whose works were published under the name of Arteaga, was a powerful centre of Gongoristic influence, and did more than most men to force culteranismo into fashion. In sermons, poems, and a masque entitled Gridonia, he never ceases to spread the plague, which lasted for a century, attacking writers as far apart as Ambrosio Roca y Serna (whose Luz del Alma appeared in 1623), and Agustín de Salazar, the author of the Cítara de Apolo (1677).