[19.] No... modelo = (la historia) no [dió] modelo á tu virtud en lo pasado.
[21.] otra = otra copia.
[192.—1-2.] Miró... victoria = la Europa miró al genio de la guerra y la victoria ensangrentar su suelo. The genio was Napoleon Bonaparte.
[4.] Al... cielo = el cielo le diera al genio del bien. Note that le is dative and al genio accusative. This otherwise admirable sonnet is marred by the numerous inversions of the word-order.
[193.]—Ecuador is a relatively small and mountainous country, lying, as the name implies, directly on the equator. The two principal cities are Guayaquil, a port on the Pacific coast, and Quito, the capital. Quito is beautifully situated on a plateau 9300 feet above the level of the sea. The climate is mild and salubrious, and drier than at Bogotá. The early Spanish colonists repeatedly wrote of the beautiful scenery and the "eternal spring" of Quito.
All of the present Ecuador belonged to the Virreinato del Perú till 1721, after which date Quito and the contiguous territory were governed from Bogotá. In 1824 Guayaquil and southern Ecuador were forcibly annexed to the first Colombia by Bolivar. Six years later Ecuador separated from Colombia and organized as a separate state.
In the territory now known as Ecuador the first colleges were established about the middle of the sixteenth century, by the Franciscans, for the natives, and by the Jesuits, as elsewhere in America, for the sons of Spaniards. Several chronicles by priests and other explorers were written during the early years of the colonial period; but no poet appears before the seventeenth century. In 1675 the Jesuit Jacinto de Evia published at Madrid his Ramillete de varias flores poéticas which contains, beside those by Evia, verses by Antonio Bastidas, a Jesuit teacher, and by Hernando Domínguez Camargo, a Colombian. The verses are mediocre or worse, and, as the date would imply, are imbued with culteranism.
The best verses of the eighteenth century were collected by the priest Juan de Velasco (1727-1819) and published in six volumes under the title of El ocioso de Faenza. These volumes contain poems by Bautista Aguirre of Guayaquil, José Orozco (La conquista de Menorca, an epic poem in four cantos), Ramón Viescas (sonnets, romances, décimas, etc.) and others, most of whom were Jesuits.
The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 caused the closure of several colleges in Ecuador, and for a time seriously hampered the work of classical education. But even before the edict of expulsion scientific study had been stimulated by the coming of French and Spanish scholars to measure a degree of the earth's surface at the equator. The coming of Humboldt in 1801 still further encouraged inquiry and research. The new spirit was given concrete expression by Dr. Francisco Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo, a physician of native descent, in El nuevo Luciano, a work famous in the literary and the political history of South America. In this work Dr. Espejo attacked the prevailing educational and economic systems of the colonies, and his doctrine did much to start the movement toward secession from the mother country.