To be more circumspect the greater their beauty.
Guevara, Luis Velez de, born in 1572 or 1574 at Ecija in Andalusia. He wrote a good deal for the stage (four hundred plays), in which he was an early follower of Lope de Vega; but the work which established his fame was the “Diablo Cojuelo,” the “Limping Devil,” which suggested the idea of Le Sag famous “Diable Boiteux.” Guevara died in the year 1644.
Hartzenbusch, Juan Eugenio, lived from 1805 to 1880, was born of a German father and Spanish mother. He is one of the first scholars, prose writers, and critics of the century, and like his contemporary, Mesonero Romanos, edited valuable collections of the flower of the old Spanish drama. His masterpiece is the tragedy, “The Lovers of Teruel,” which treats upon an old Spanish legend, and is one of the most popular of modern plays. An opera with the same title and subject, by a Spanish composer of the day, is also deservedly popular. “Mariquita la Pelona,” which is taken from a collection of short tales by this author, is written in old Spanish, and has a sequel in a modern “Mariquita,” who repairs to a convent for a year to obtain possession of a sum of money offered her by some unknown person, on condition she undergoes this temporary confinement, to find at the expiration of the twelve months that the mysterious donor is a slighted suitor, who had vowed to humiliate her.
Iglesias, born in Salamanca, wrote a number of poems, the lighter of which have alone retained popularity, the serious and duller ones, written after he became a priest, being justly neglected. He died in 1791.
Isla, Father, was born in 1703, and died in 1781 at Bologna, where, being a Jesuit, he had been sent on the general expulsion of his order from Spain. He was an author possessed of a brilliant and delicate satire, most thoroughly exemplified in his celebrated work, “The History of the Famous Preacher, Friar Gerund,” a direct attack on the bad style of preaching then in vogue. Padre Isla is also prominent as the translator into Spanish of “Gil Blas,” which, without any foundation, he maintained had been stolen by Le Sage from Spanish literature.
Jérica (Xérica), Pablo de (he was a young man during the French revolution), is very severely criticised by Blanco García in his “History of the Literature of the Nineteenth Century.”
Larra, Mariano José de (Figaro), was born in Madrid in the year 1809. Receiving his first education in France, where his father served as doctor in Napoleon’s army, he returned to complete it at Madrid, and afterwards repaired to the University of Valladolid, where he began to study law. He wrote his first prose essays at the age of twenty, but it was his later articles, signed “El pobrecito Hablador,” which first gave him the undisputed reputation of critic and writer of “costumbres,” among the host of which, his Spanish contemporaries and imitators, he reigns supreme, while what preserve his fame are the brilliant and satirical articles signed “Figaro,” amongst which “The Old Castilian,” and “Yo quiero ser comico,” are the best known. Unfortunately his private life was disturbed by wild love affairs, and he committed suicide on account of an attachment to a married lady, in 1837, at the age of twenty-eight.
“Libro de los Exemplos” (author unknown). This collection of tales is considered by Don Pascual de Gayangos to be posterior to Don Juan Manuel. The greater part of the tales are taken from Rabbi Mosch Sefardi’s “Disciplina Clericalis” (early part of the twelfth century), probably the Latin translation of an Arabic original, which is drawn from Oriental sources, and is itself the common well from which drew, amongst others, the authors of the “Gesta Romanorum,” the “Decameron,” and the “Canterbury Tales.” The story entitled “The Biter Bit” figures, for instance, in the “Disciplina Clericalis” and the Gesta Romanorum. “El Libro de los Gatos” belongs to the same century as the “Libro de los Exemplos” (or Enxemplos).
Lope Felix de Vega Carpio was born on November 25, 1562, at Madrid. This extraordinary Spanish genius, second only to Cervantes, than whom he was more popular during the lifetime of both, rose to a degree of fame reached by few of any country. Epics, serious and humorous (see “Gatomaquia”); novelas; ballads; epigrams; plays—religious, heroic, of intrigue, or of domestic life; nothing, in fact, came amiss to his pen. But it is as dramatist that he is best known, and in which quality his facility was such that at his death it was reckoned he had composed eighteen hundred plays and four hundred autos (religious dramas), while it is stated that one of his plays was written and acted within five days. Lope de Vega’s last days were the prey to a melancholy fanaticism. He regretted he had ever been engaged in any occupations but such as were exclusively religious; and on one occasion he went through with a private discipline so cruel that the walls of the compartment where it occurred were found sprinkled with his blood. From this he never recovered, and he died on August 27, 1635, nearly seventy-three years old. His funeral, which immense crowds thronged to see, lasted nine days; and of the eulogies and poems written on the occasion, those in Spanish were sufficient to form one volume, those in Italian another.
Manuel, Prince Don Juan, born May 5, 1282, at Escalona, died 1349, was of the blood royal of Castile and Leon, nephew to Alfonso the Wise, cousin to Sancho IV. He first fought against the Moors when he was twelve, and the rest of his years were spent in filling great offices in the State, or in military operations on the Moorish frontier. In spite of a life full of intrigue and violence he devoted himself successfully to literature, and is the first great Spanish prose writer. In “Count Lucanor,” his best and more known work, most of the tales are of Oriental origin. That Shakespeare knew the tale, here given the title of his play, is indubitable; while “The Naked King” will appear familiar to readers of Hans Andersen’s fairy tales (“The Emperor’s New Clothes” in its turn has given the plot for Ludwig Fulda’s drama, “The Talisman,” considered the best German play of the last three years, and recently introduced into England by Mr. Beerbohm Tree under the title of “Once Upon a Time”).