Join conflict: lo! the batter'd Paynim flies;
The din, the smouldering flames, he braves no more.
Go, bid thy deep-toned bass with voice of power
Tell of this mightiest victory under sky,
This deed of peerless valour's highest strain;
And say a youth achieved the glorious hour,
Hallowing thy gulf with praise that ne'er shall die,—
The youth of Austria, and the might of Spain."
Herrera takes up the tradition of his forerunner, perfects his form, imparts a greater sonority of expression, a deeper note of pathos and dignity. The soldier, with his languid sentiment, might be the priest; the priest, with his martial music, might be the soldier. Yet Herrera's fealty never wavers; for him there is but one model, one pattern, one perfect singer. "In our Spain," he avers, "Garcilaso stands first, beyond compare." And in this spirit, aided by suggestions from the poet's son-in-law, Puerto Carrero, aided also by illustrations from the whole Sevillan group,—Francisco de Medina, Diego Girón, Francisco Pacheco, and Cristóbal Mosquera de Figueroa,—Herrera undertook his commentary, Anotaciones á las obras de Garcilaso de la Vega (1580). Its publication caused one of the bitterest quarrels in Spanish literary history.
Four years earlier Garcilaso had been edited by the learned Francisco Sánchez (1523-1601), commonly called El Brocense, from Las Brozas, his birthplace, in Extremadura; and an excitable admirer of the poet, Francisco de los Cobos, denounced Sánchez for exhibiting his author's debts by means of parallel passages. The partisans of Sánchez took Herrera's commentary as a challenge, and were not mollified by the fact that Herrera nowhere mentioned Sánchez by name. It had been bad enough that an Extremaduran pundit should edit a Castilian poet; that a mere Andalucían should repeat the outrage was insufferable. It was as though an Englishman edited Burns. The Clan of Clonglocketty (or of Castile) rose as one man, and Herrera was flagellated by a tribe of scurrilous, illiterate patriots. Among his more urbane opponents was Juan Fernández de Velasco, Conde de Haro, son of the Constable of Spain, who published his Observaciones under the pseudonym of Prete Jacopín, and was rapturously applauded for calling Herrera an ass in a lion's skin. It is discouraging to record that Haro's impertinence went through several editions, while Herrera's commentary has never been reprinted.[9] Yet this monument of enlightened learning reveals its author, not only as the best lyrist, but as the acutest critic of his age. Cervantes knew it almost by heart, and he honoured it by writing his dedication of Don Quixote to the Duque de Béjar in the very words of Medina's preface and of Herrera's epistle to the Marqués de Ayamonte. So that, since countless readers have admired a passage from the Anotaciones without knowing it, Herrera the prose-writer has enjoyed a vicarious immortality.