Meanwhile a few held out against the mode. The Sevillan, Juan de Arguijo (? d. 1629), continued the tradition of Herrera, writing in Italian measures with a smoothness of versification and a dignified correctness which drew applause from one camp and hissing from the other. His townsman, Juan de Jáuregui y Aguilar (? 1570-1650), came into notice with his version of Tasso's Aminta (1607), one of the best translations ever made, deserving of the high praise which Cervantes bestows on it and on Cristóbal de Figueroa's rendering of the Pastor Fido:—"They make us doubt which is the translation and which the original." In his Aminta, as in his original poems, Jáuregui's style is a model of purity and refinement, as might be expected from the Discurso poético launched later against Góngora; but the tide was too strong for him. His Orfeo (1624) shows signs of wavering, and in his translation, the Farsalia, which was not published till 1684, he is almost as extreme a Gongorist as the worst. Still it should be remembered that Lucan also was a Córdoban, practising early Gongorism at Nero's court, and a translator is prone to reproduce the defects of his original. Jáuregui has some points of resemblance with Rossetti, was a famous artist in his day, and is said, on the strength of a dubious passage in the prologue to the Novelas, to have painted Cervantes.
Esteban Manuel de Villegas (1596-1669) shows rare poetic qualities in his Eróticas ó Amatorias (1617), in which he announces himself as the rising sun. Sicut sol matutinus is printed on his title-page, where those waning stars, Lope, Calderón, and Quevedo, are also supplied with a prophetic motto: Me surgente, quid istæ? His imitations of Anacreon and Catullus are done with amazing gusto, all the more wonderful when we remember that his "sweet songs and suave delights" were written at fourteen, retouched and published at twenty. But Villegas is one of the great disappointments of Castilian literature: he married in 1626, deserted verse for law, and ended life a poor, embittered attorney. The Sevillan canon and royal librarian, Francisco de Rioja (? 1586-1659), follows the example of Herrera, his sonnets and silvas being distinguished for their correct form and their philosophic melancholy. But Rioja has been unlucky. One poem, entitled Las Ruinas de Itálica, has won for him a very great reputation; and yet, in fact, as Fernández-Guerra y Orbe has proved, the Ruinas is due to Rodrigo Caro (1573-1647), the archæologist who wrote the Memorial de Utrera and the Antigüedades de Sevilla. Adolfo de Castro goes further, ascribing the Epístola moral á Fabio to Pedro Fernández de Andrado, author of the Libro de la Gineta. Thus despoiled of two admirable pieces, Rioja is less important than he seemed thirty years since; yet, even so, he ranks, with the Príncipe de Esquilache (1581-1658) and the Conde de Rebolledo (1597-1676), among the sounder influences of his time.
The Segovian poet, Alonso de Ledesma Buitrago (1552-1623), founded the school of conceptismo with its metaphysical conceits, philosophic paradoxes, and sententious moralisings, as of a Seneca gone mad. His Conceptos espirituales and Juegos de la Noche Buena (1611) lead up to the allegorical gibberish of his Monstruo Imaginado (1615), and to the perverted ingenuity of Alonso de Bonilla's Nuevo Jardín de Flores divinas (1617). Conceptismo was no less an evil than culteranismo, but it was less likely to spread: the latter played with words, the former with ideas. A bizarre vocabulary was enough for a man to pass as culto; the conceptista must be equipped with various learning, and must have a smattering of philosophy. Under such chiefs as Ledesma and Bonilla the new mania must have died; but conceptismo was in the air, and, as Carrillo seduced Góngora, so Ledesma captured Francis Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas (1580-1645): (it should be said, however, that Quevedo nowhere mentions Ledesma by name). Like Lope, like Calderón, Quevedo was a highlander. His family boasted the punning motto:—"I am he who stopped—el que vedó—the Moors' advance." His father (who died early) and mother both held posts at court. At Alcalá de Henares, from 1596 onwards, Quevedo took honours in theology, law, French, Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew. He is also said to have studied medicine; and certainly he hated Sangrado as Dickens hated Bumble. When scarcely out of his teens he corresponded with Justus Lipsius, who hailed him as μέγα κῦδος Ἱβήρων, and at Madrid he speedily became the talk of the town. Strange stories were told of him: that he had pinked his man at Alcalá, that he ran Captain Rodríguez through the body rather than yield him the wall, that he put an escaped panther to the sword, that he disarmed the famous fencing-master, Pacheco Narváez. This last tale is true, and is curious in view of Quevedo's physical defects. His reply to Vicencio Valerio in Su Espada por Santiago is well known:—"He says I hobble, and can't see. I should lie from head to foot if I denied it: my eyes and my gait would contradict me."
For all his short sight and clubbed feet, he was ever too ready with his rapier. On Maundy Thursday, 1611, he witnessed a scuffle between a man and woman during Tenebræ in St. Martin's Church. He intervened, the argument was continued outside, swords were crossed, and Quevedo's opponent fell mortally wounded. As the man was a noble, Quevedo prudently escaped from possible consequences to Sicily. He returned to his estate, La Torre de Juan Abad, in 1612, but soon wearied of country life, and was sent on diplomatic missions to Genoa, Milan, Venice, and Rome. On Osuna's promotion to Naples, Quevedo became Finance Minister, proving himself a capable administrator. In 1618 he meddled in the Spanish plot which forms the motive of Otway's Venice Preserved, and, disguised as a beggar, escaped from the bravos told off to murder him. His public career ended at this time, for his subsequent appointment as Felipe IV.'s secretary was merely nominal. In 1627 he shared in a furious polemic. Santa Teresa was canonised in 1622, and, at the joint instance of Carmelites and Jesuits, was made co-patron of Spain with Santiago. The Papal Bull (July 31, 1627) divided Spain into two camps. Quevedo, who was of the Order of Santiago—"red with the blood of the brave"—took up the cudgels for St. James, was branded a "hypocritical blackguard" by one party, and was extolled by the other as the "Captain of Combat," "the Ensign of the Apostle." He shamed Pope, King, Olivares, the religious, and half the laity, and the Bull was withdrawn (June 28, 1630). The victory cost him a year's exile, and when Olivares offered him the embassy at Genoa, he refused it, on the ground that he did not wish to have his mouth thus closed. After his unlucky marriage to Esperanza de Mendoza, widow of Juan Fernández de Heredia, he began a campaign against the royal favourite. Olivares' turn came in December 1639, when the King found by his plate a copy of verses urging him to cease his extravagance and to dismiss his incapable ministers. Quevedo was—perhaps rightly—suspected of writing these lines, was arrested at midnight, and was whisked away, half dressed, to the monastery of St. Mark in León. For four years he was imprisoned in a cell below the level of the river, and, when released after Olivares' fall in 1643, his health was broken. A flash of his old humour appears in his reply to the priest who begged him to arrange for music at his funeral:—"Nay, let them pay that hear it."
As a prose writer he began with a Life of St. Thomas of Villanueva (1620), and ended with a Life of St. Paul the Apostle (1644). These, and his other moralisings—Virtue Militant, the Cradle and the Tomb—call for no notice here. The Política de Dios (1618) is apparently an abstract plea for absolutism; in fact, it exposes the weakness of Spanish administration just as the Marcus Brutus (1644) is a vehicle for opinions on contemporary politics. Learned and acute, these treatises show Quevedo's concern for his country's future, and a passage in his sixty-eighth sonnet forecasts the future of the Spanish colonies:—"'Tis likelier far, O Spain! that what thou alone didst take from all, all will take from thee alone"—
"Y es más facil! oh España ¡en muchas modas
Que lo que á todos les quitaste sola,
Te puedan á tí sola quitar todos."
The prophecy is just being fulfilled, and the chief interest of Quevedo's prose treatises lies in their conceptismo—the flashy epigram, the pompous paradox, the strained antithesis, the hairsplitting and refining in and out of season. It was vain for Quevedo to edit Luis de León and Torre as a protest against Gongorism, for in his own practice he substituted one affectation for another.
The true and simpler Quevedo is to be sought elsewhere. His picaresque Historia de la Vida del Buscón, best known by its unauthorised title, El Gran Tacaño (The Prime Scoundrel), though not published till 1626, was probably written soon after 1608. Pablo, son of a barber and a loose woman, follows a rich schoolfellow to Alcalá, where he shines in every kind of devilry. Thence he passes into a gang of thieves, is imprisoned, lives as a sham cripple, an actor, a bravo, and finally—his author being weary of him—emigrates to America. There is no attempt at creating character, no vulgar obtrusion of Alemán's moralising tone: such amusement as the novel contains is afforded by the invention of heartless incident and the acrid rendering of villany. The harsh jeering, the intense brutality, the unsympathetic wit and art of the Buscón, make it one of the cleverest books in the world, as it is one of the cruellest and coarsest in its misanthropic enjoyment of baseness and pain. No less characteristic of Quevedo are his Sueños (Visions), printed in 1627. These fantastic pieces are really five in number, though most collections print seven or eight; for the Infierno Enmendado (Hell Reformed) is not a vision, but is rather a sequel to the Política de Dios; the Casa de Locos de Amor is probably the work of Quevedo's friend, Lorenzo van der Hammen; and the Fortuna con Seso was not written till 1635. Quevedo himself calls the Sueño de la Muerte (Vision of Death) the fifth and last of the series. Satire in Lucian's manner had already been introduced into Spanish literature by Valdés in the Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón, in the Crotalón (which most authorities ascribe to Cristóbal de Villalón), and in the Coloquio de los Perros. In witty observation and ridicule of whole sections of society, Quevedo almost vies with Cervantes, though his unfeeling cynicism gives his work an individual flavour. His lost poets are doomed to hear each other's verses for eternity, his statesmen jostle bandits, doctors and murderers end their careers as brethren, comic men dwell in an inferno apart lest their jokes should damp hell's fires,—grim jests which may be read in Roger L'Estrange's spirited amplification.