[160] Baltasar del Alcázar was born in 1540 and died in 1606. His graceful, witty poems were reissued in 1878 by the Sociedad de Bibliófilos Andaluces. Alcázar's Sonnet on a Sonnet (see note 21) lacks a line in the version printed by Gallardo, op. cit., vol. i., col. 75.
[161] Cristóbal Mosquera de Figueroa was born in 1553 and died in 1610. He is best known as the author of a Comentario en breve compendio de disciplina militar (Madrid, 1596) for which Cervantes wrote a sonnet on the famous Marqués de Santa Cruz. Specimens of Mosquera de Figueroa's verse are to be found in Herrera's edition of Garcilaso.
[162] The Sevillian priest, Domingo de Becerra, as appears from Fernández de Navarrete's Vida de Cervantes Saavedra (Madrid, 1819, pp. 386-387), was a prisoner in Algiers with Cervantes, and was ransomed at the same time as the latter. Becerra was then (1580) forty-five years of age. He translated Giovanni Della Casa's Il Galateo, and published his version at Venice in 1585.
[163] Vicente Espinel was born in 1550 and is conjectured to have died between 1624 and 1634. He is said to have added a fifth string to the guitar, and to have introduced espinelas: "perdónesele Dios," is Lope's comment in the Dorotea (act. i. sc. vii.). Espinel's Diversas rimas (1591) are now only known to students; but his picaresque novel, Marcos de Obregón (Madrid, 1618), still finds, and deserves to find, many readers. In the 1775 edition of the Siècle de Louis XIV. Voltaire alleged that Gil Blas was "entièrement pris du roman espagnol La Vidad de lo Escudiero Dom Marcos d'Obrego." It will be observed that, in transcribing the title, Voltaire makes almost as many mistakes as the number of words allows. His statement is a grotesque exaggeration, but it had the merit of suggesting a successful practical joke to José Francisco de Isla. This sly wag translated Gil Blas into Spanish, mischievously pretending that the book was thus "restored to its country and native language by a jealous Spaniard who will not allow his nation to be made fun of." Unluckily, the naughty Jesuit did not live to see the squabbles of the learned critics who fell into the trap that he had baited for them. It is, by the way, a curious and disputed point whether the Comte de Neufchâteau's celebrated Examen de la question de savoir si Lesage est l'auteur de Gil Blas ou s'il l'a pris de l'espagnol (1818) was, or was not, taken word for word from a juvenile essay by Victor Hugo: see Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie (Bruxelles and Leipzig, 1863), vol. i., p. 396. In the Adjunta al Parnaso Cervantes calls Espinel "uno de los más antiguos y verdaderos amigos que yo tengo." In his Rimas Espinel had been most complimentary to Cervantes. But Pellicer and Fernández de Navarrete have spoken harshly of him for being (as they imagined) jealous of the success of Don Quixote; and Mr. Henry Edward Watts (op. cit., p. 157, n. 1) asserts that Espinel "took occasion after Cervantes' death to speak of his own Marcos de Obregón ... as superior to Don Quixote." This is not so. There may be authors who suppose that their immortal masterpieces are superior to the ephemeral writings of everybody else: but they seldom say this—at least, in print. Nor did Espinel. It must suffice, for the moment, to note that the above-mentioned fable is mainly based on the fact that the Gongoresque poet and preacher, Hortensio Félix Paravicino y Arteaga, wrote as follows in his Aprobación to Marcos de Obregón: "El Libro del Escudero, que escriuio el Maestro Espinel, y V. M. me manda censurar, he visto, y no hallo en el cosa que se oponga à nuestra santa Fè Catolica Romana, ni ofenda à la piedad de las buenas costumbres della, antes de los libros deste género, que parece de entretenimiento comun, es el que con más razón deue ser impreso, por tener el prouecho tan cerca del deleyte, que sin perjudicar enseña, y sin diuertir entretiene: el estilo, la inuencion, el gusto de las cosas, y la moralidad, que deduze dellas, arguyen bien la pluma que la ha escrito, tan justamente celebrada en todas naciones. A mi alomenos de los libros deste argumento me parece la mejor cosa que nuestra lengua tendrà, y que V.m. deue darle vna aprouacion muy honrada. Guarde nuestro Señor à V. M."
It is Paravicino, not Espinel, who speaks: and the eulogistic phrases which he uses do not exceed the limits of the recognized convention on such occasions.
[164] Jerónimo Sánchez de Carranza was introduced to England by Ben Jonson as an authority on honour and arms. Bobadil, in Every Man in his humour (Act 1, sc. 4) says:—"By the foot of Pharaoh, an' 'twere my case now I should send him a chartel presently. The bastinado, a most proper and sufficient dependence, warranted by the great Carranza." Carranza wrote the Philosophia y destreza de las armas (Sanlúcar de Barrameda, 1582); a later treatise, the Libro de las grandezas de la espada (Madrid, 1600) was issued by the counter-expert of the next generation, Luis Pacheco de Narváez. I need scarcely remind most readers that Pacheco de Narváez, the famous fencing-master, was ignominiously disarmed by Quevedo—an incomparable hand with the foil, despite his lameness and short sight. Pacheco naturally smarted under the disgrace, and seems to have shown his resentment in an unpleasant fashion whenever he had an opportunity. The respective merits of Carranza and Pacheco divided Madrid into two camps. Literary men were prominent in the fray. Suárez de Figueroa, Vélez de Guevara, and Ruiz de Alarcón declared for Pacheco. Among Carranza's partisans were Luis Mendoza de Carmona and, as might be expected, Quevedo who mentions the Libro de las grandezas de la espada in his Historia de la vida del Buscón (lib. i. cap. viii.).
[165] Two sonnets by Lázaro Luis Iranzo are given in Rivadeneyra, op. cit., vol. iv., pp. 180, 364.
[166] Baltasar de Escobar is represented in Espinosa's Flores de poetas ilustres: a complimentary letter addressed by Escobar to Cristóbal de Virués is printed in Rivadeneyra, op. cit., vol. lxii., p. 37.
[167] A sonnet on the sack of Cádiz by Juan Sanz de Zumeta is given in Juan Antonio Pellicer's edition of Don Quixote (Madrid, 1797-1798), vol. i., p. lxxxvi.
[168] The correct, full form of this writer's name seems to be Juan de la Cueva de Garoza. He is conjectured to have been born in 1550 and to have died in 1609. This interesting dramatist was among the most distinguished of Lope de Vega's immediate predecessors, and in such plays as El Cerco de Zamora he comes near anticipating Lope's methods. In his Exemplar poético (1609) Cueva declares that he was the first to bring kings upon the stage, an innovation that was censured at the time:—