Thus sang Belardo, at her door,
His shepherd girl to wait upon,
Who scornful, from her casement o’er,
Bids him be silent and begone.
IV.
LEANDRO FERNANDEZ MORATIN.
Spanish writers have in general too much overrated the [merits of their national dramas], and foreigners have too often repeated the eulogies, as if they were deserved. Like those of antiquity, the Spanish, though they abound in passages of much poetry and feeling, are almost entirely deficient in that delineation of individual character, which constitutes the highest class of the art. Thus all the representations may be observed of the same description of personages and incidents, given often with much ingenuity, but also often in the worst taste, and always betokening a limited power of invention. Of this school Calderon de la Barca was the great type, both as regards his merits and defects. Lopez de Vega too, though his comedies are more representations of manners and every-day life than Calderon’s, only showed his capability of something better, if he had allowed his genius to seek a reputation for perfectness, rather than for fecundity. The inferior order of writers mistook the errors of these for excellences, and thus exaggerated them.
There were not, however, wanting in Spain persons of better judgement, who observed those errors with a view to correct them, and among whom the prominent place is due to the two Moratins, father and son. Of these the former seems to have been the first of his countrymen who openly denounced the wrong tendencies of the national dramatists; and the latter, following in the same track, may be pronounced the great reformer of the Spanish stage, to whom it owes some of its best productions.
The elder Moratin was one of the ablest writers of verses in Spain during the last century, before the new æra of poetry arose, and his merits, if not of themselves superior to those of his contemporaries, have had an advantage over them, in connexion with the reputation of the son, who has rendered them more celebrated by a pleasing memoir of his father, prefixed to his works. From this we learn, that if the father did not attain a high rank himself as a poet or dramatist, yet he well deserves to be remembered as a bold and judicious critic, who, both by precept and example, effected much good in his own day, and still more by instilling good lessons into the mind of the son, so as to enable him to attain his merited success.