Should cruel Fate withhold from its domain?"
In his Profecía del Tajo (Prophecy of the Tagus) Luis de León displays a virility absent from his other pieces, and the impetuosity of the verse matches the speed which he attributes to the Saracenic invaders advancing to the overthrow of Roderic; and, if he still abide by his Horatian model, he introduces an individual treatment, a characteristic melody of his own invention. A famous devout song, Á Cristo Crucifijado (To Christ Crucified), appears in all editions of Fray Luis; but as its authenticity is disputed—some ascribing it to Miguel Sánchez—its quotation must be foregone here. The ode Al Apartamiento (To Retirement) exhibits the contemplative vein which distinguishes the singer, and, as in the Ode to Salinas, seems an early anticipation of Wordsworth's note of serene simplicity. Luis de León is not splendid in metrical resource, and his adherence to tradition, his indifference to his fame, his ecclesiastical estate, all tend to narrow his range of subject; yet, within the limits marked out for him, he is as great an artist and as rich a voice as Spain can show.
In the same year (1631) that Quevedo issued Luis de León's verses, he also published an exceedingly small volume of poems which he ascribed to a Bachelor named Francisco de la Torre (1534-?1594). From this arose a strange case of mistaken identity. Quevedo's own account of the matter is simple: he alleges that he found the poems—"by good luck and for the greater glory of Spain"—in the shop of a bookseller, who sold them cheap. It appears that the Portuguese, Juan de Almeida, Senhor de Couto de Avintes, saw them soon after Torre's death, that he applied for leave to print them, and that the official licence was signed by the author of La Araucana, Ercilla y Zúñiga, who died in 1595. For some reason Almeida's purpose miscarried, and, when Quevedo found the manuscript in 1629, Torre was generally forgotten. Quevedo solved the difficulty out of hand in the high editorial manner, evolved the facts from his inner consciousness, and assured his readers that the author of the poems was the Francisco de la Torre who wrote the Visión deleitable.[11]
Ticknor lays it down that "no suspicion seems to have been whispered, either at the moment of their first publication, or for a long time afterwards," of the correctness of this attribution; and he implies that the first doubter was Luis José Velázquez, Marqués de Valdeflores, who, when he reprinted the book in 1753, started the theory that the poems were Quevedo's own. This is not so. Quevedo's mistake was pointed out by Manuel de Faria y Sousa in his commentary to the Lusiadas, printed at Madrid in 1639. That Quevedo should make a Bachelor of a man who had no university degree, that he should call the writer of the Visión deleitable Francisco when in truth his name was Alfonso, were trifles: that he should antedate his author by nearly two centuries—this was a serious matter, and Faria y Sousa took pains to make him realise it. It must have added to the editor's chagrin to learn that Torre had been friendly with Lope de Vega, who could have given accurate information about him; but Lope and Quevedo were not on speaking terms, owing to the mischief-making of the former's parasite, Pérez de Montalbán. Quevedo had made no approach to Lope; Lope saw the blunder, smiled, and said nothing in public. Through Pérez de Montalbán the facts reached Faria y Sousa, who exulted over a mistake which was, indeed, unpardonable. The discomfiture was complete: for the first and last time in his life Quevedo was dumb before an enemy. Meanwhile, Velázquez' theory has found some favour with López Sedano and with many foreign critics: as, for example, Ticknor.
What we know of Francisco de la Torre is based upon the researches of Quevedo's learned editor, Aureliano Fernández-Guerra y Orbe.[12] A native of Torrelaguna, he matriculated at Alcalá de Henares in 1556, fell in love with the "Filis rigurosa" whom he sings, served with Carlos Quinto in the Italian campaigns, returned to find Filis married to an elderly Toledan millionaire, remained constant to his (more or less) platonic flame, and ended by taking orders in his despair. The unadorned simplicity of his manner is at the remotest pole from Quevedo's frosty brilliancy. No small proportion of his sonnets is translated from the Italian. Thus, where Benedetto Varchi writes "Questa e, Tirsi, quel fonte in cui solea," Torre follows close with "Ésta es, Tirsi, la fuente do solia;" and when Giovanni Battista Amalteo celebrates "La viva neve e le vermiglie rose," the Spaniard echoes back "La blanca nieve y la purpúrea rosa." Schelling finds the light fantastic rapture of the Elizabethan lover expressed to perfection in the eighty-first of Spenser's Amoretti: line for line, and almost word for word, Torre's twenty-third sonnet is identical, and, when we at length possess a critical edition of Spenser, it will surely prove that both poems derive from a common Italian source. Such examples are numerous, and are worth noting as germane to the general question. No man in Europe was more original than Quevedo, none less disposed to lean on Italy. To conceive that he should seek to reform culteranismo by translating from Italians of yesterday, or to suppose that he knowingly passed as original work imitations made by a man who—ex hypothesi—died before his models were born, is to believe Quevedo a clumsy trickster. That conclusion is untenable; and Torre deserves all credit for his graceful renderings, as for his more original poems—gallant, tender, and sentimental. He is one of the earliest Spanish poets to choose simple, natural themes—the ivy fallen to the ground, the widowed song-bird, the wounded hind, the charms of landscape and the enchantment of the spring. A smaller replica of Garcilaso, with a vision and personality of his own: so Francisco de la Torre appears in the perspective of Castilian song.
An allied poet of the Salamancan school is Torre's friend, Francisco de Figueroa (1536-?1620), a native of Alcalá de Henares, whom his townsman Cervantes introduces in the pastoral Galatea under the name of Tirsi. Little is recorded of his life save that he served as a soldier in Italy, that he studied at Rome, Bologna, Siena, and perhaps Naples, that the Italians called him the Divino (the title was sometimes cheaply given), and that some even ranked him next to Petrarch. He returned to Alcalá, where he married "nobly," as we are told; and he is found travelling with the Duque de Terranova in the Low Countries about 1597. On his deathbed he bethought him of Virgil's example, and ordered that all his poems should be burned; those that escaped were published at Lisbon in 1626 by the historian Luis Tribaldos de Toledo, who reports what little we know concerning the writer. That he versified much in Italian appears from Juan Verzosa's evidence:—
"El lingua perges alterna pangere versus."
And a vestige of the youthful practice is preserved in the elegy to Juan de Mendoza y Luna, where one Spanish line and two Italian lines compose each tercet. One admirable sonnet is that written on the death of the poet's son, Garcilaso de la Vega el Mozo, who, like his famous father, fell in battle. Figueroa's bent is towards the pastoral; he sings of sweet repose, of love's costly glory, of Tirsi's pangs, of Fileno's passion realised, and of ingrata Fili. His points of resemblance with Torre are many; but his talent is more original, his mood more melancholy, his taste finer, his diction more exquisite. He ranks so high among his country's singers, it is not incredible that he might take his stand with the greatest if we possessed all his poems, instead of a few numbers saved from fire. And, as it is, he deserves peculiar praise as the earliest poet who, following Boscán and Garcilaso, mastered the blank verse, whose secrets had eluded them. He avoids the subtle peril of the assonant; he varies the mechanical uniformity of beat or stress; and, by skilful alternations of his cæsura, diversifies his rhythm to such harmonic purpose as no earlier experimentalist approaches. At his hands the most formidable of Castilian metres is finally vanquished, and the verso suelto is established on an equality with the sonnet. That alone ensures Figueroa's fame: he sets the standard by which successors are measured.
Ariosto's vigorous epical manner is faintly suggested in twelve cantos of the Angélica, by a Seville doctor, Luis Barahona de Soto (fl. 1586). Lope de Vega, in the Laurel de Apolo, praises
"The doctor admirable