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Dardanio, who bids him ask any thing which he desires, and promises to gratify him in it, however impossible it may be. It might have been supposed that his first thought would have been to ask Belisarda for a wife;-this, however, would have spoiled the story, and poor Aufriso was not more fortunate in his use of this fair opportunity, than the woman in the well known tale of the Three Wishes. He only desired to see the object of his love. Dardanio accordingly raised a spirit, who took them up in a whirlwind, carried them so high that they came near the Gemini, and after giving them a bird's-eye view of Europe, Africa, and Asia, set them down safely upon Mount Cyllene. Here the magician transforms himself into a lean pony, and takes Anfriso, in the form of a decrepid old woodman, upon his back; thus disguised they approached Belisarda, who, somewhat oddly, is generally described as driving ducks instead of sheep. They come near enough to see her in conversation with a certain Olympio, one of ber numerous admirers, but not to hear what passes;-the shepherd does not pretend to entertain any hope of winning her affections, but entreats her so earnestly to give him a black ribband in exchange for a carved spoon,-that in evil hour she consents; Anfriso, seeing this and hearing nothing, would fain have put her to death for her seeming perfidy; but Dardanio, who for a sage and a friend had acted alike unwisely in both characters, carries him back in the whirlwind as fast as they came, and then disappears, leaving him in his error and in the misery which it occa→ sions, to wander where he will. After travelling till he comes to the sea shore, he there finds some one with letters from his parents; these letters induce him to return home, and there, by the advice of a friend, he pays court to Anarda, in order to revenge himself upon Belisarda, by making her jealous. Unconscious of having deserved such treatment, Belisarda resents it in the same spirit, and affects to favour Olympio in Anfriso's sight. They succeed in acting their parts perfectly, and in making each other miserable; and in this state of mind Belisarda desperately marries Salicio. Soon afterwards she meets Anfriso, and an explanation takes place when it is too late. Anfriso, who had at first become well nigh as furious as Orlando, is persuaded by some of his friends to apply for relief to the Sage Polinesta, who can cure him of his love. To her accordingly he goes, and she tells him that in such cases remedy is not impossible where it is truly desired;→ he must strip himself of whatever he had worn till that time, and put on fresh garments, and be bathed in various waters, and with various perfumes rid himself of the odours of his old imaginations. When this was done, his cure was to be completed by a visit to the temple of

VOL. XVIII. NO. XXXV.

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of the Liberal Arts, where in virtuous employment he would learn to forget Belisarda. Here the author takes up one of the tritest allegories of the sixteenth century. The fair damsel, Lady Grammar, receives him in her saloon and recites to him a poem on the art over which she presides; Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, and Geometry do the same; the latter lady has a fair daughter named Perspective. Music entertains him with a song to her viol, Astrology with a sonnet, and Poetry sings her own praises to the harp. The end of all this is, that he is now fully prepared to mount the hill and arrive at the Temple of Desengaño, an allegorical personage who is a great favourite among the peninsular poets and preachers, but for whom our language affords no name.

Among the commendatory verses prefixed to the Arcadia is a sonnet written in the character of Anfriso, addressed to Lope de Vega, calling him in the sonnet by the name which he had given himself in the romance, and acknowledging that the book contains the history of his own love. The first two lines imply that he was a powerful man who had taken Lope under his protection.

Belardo que a mi tierra ayays venido,

Y a ser uno tambien de mis pastores.

In the romance itself Anfriso is called noble; and a sonnet upon the death of his mother distinctly marks him for one of the Álva family. The painter Francisco Pacheco, in the eulogy which accompanies his portrait of Lope de Vega, says, that in the Arcadia the author had succeeded in what he designed, which was to record a real story according to the pleasure of the parties.'-Now the Diana of George of Montemayor is written precisely upon the same subject as the Arcadia, it is the story of a lover desengañado, reconciling himself to the loss of his mistress, and drinking forgetfulness of his passion from the fountain of the Sage Felicia. The French translator of this work says it was believed in Spain to contain the private history of the Duke of Alva, in whose service George of Montemayor had lived. These are curious circumstances, and the assertion that the Arcadia was written by the Duke of Alva's desire, and the certain fact that Lope de Vega was at one time in his service, strongly support the inference to which they lead. That Alva, the bloody and inexorable Alva, should in his old age delight in having the loves of his youth recorded in pastoral strains, and choose to be described as a love-lorn shepherd, tending flocks and singing madrigals, seems more out of nature than any thing in Arcadian romance. fitly was he represented by the statue which he set up at Antwerp, an armed and brazen image, trampling upon heresy and rebellion; in other words-upon religion and liberty! Yet it is difficult to

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resist the evidence which has here been collected; and perhaps the inconsistency is not in truth so great as it appears. Strength of feeling will generally be found to co-exist with strength of character; or rather it is by the perfect subjection and controul of strong feelings, that a strong character is formed and manifested. Alva was born in inauspicious times, and the circumstances of his rank and country were such that he was called upon to bear in them a most conspicuous and cruel part: but he had qualities which, under other circumstances, might have given him a place, not only with statesmen and generals, but among the most heroic names of history. No common frame of mind, and no ordinary foresight were evinced in his remark, that Don Quixote would be the ruin of Spain. It is likely that such a man might remember the conquest over his own affections in early life as the most difficult victory he had ever obtained; and it is not impossible that one too conversant with inquisitions, scaffolds, saccages, and scenes of blood, when he had leisure for literature should delight in the representation of scenes, and manners, and pursuits the most opposite to those in which he was conscientiously but unhappily engaged. And here a memorable fact in the history of this personage may be mentioned. During the last few weeks of his life Alva received no other sustenance than from the breast of a woman, Alva who had made so many a woman childless, and under whose remorseless orders sq many babes and mothers had been involved in undistinguishing destruction! A more deplorable picture of human infirmity cannot be conceived, nor a more impressive one to those who are acquainted with the character of the Low Country wars.

The censure which Lord Holland passes upon the conduct of the Arcadia is not altogether accurate-there is no foundation for his remark that the shepherds occasionally talk theology; neither are the discussions upon the liberal sciences and the epitaphs of the Spanish generals placed in their mouths, as his language would imply. But the opinion which he expresses of the work is discriminating and just, and in the spirit of a liberal and ingenuous mind, better pleased when it can bestow praise than when it must award censure. The following verses, which his lordship has given as no unfavourable specimen of the poetical part of the book, exhibit a fair one of his own extraordinary skill in translation.

1.

In the green season of my flowering years,
I liv'd, O Love! a captive in thy chains;
Sang of delusive hopes and idle fears,
And wept thy follies in my wisest strains :
Sad sport of time when under thy controul,
So wild was grown my wit, so blind my soul.

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'But

2.

'But from the yoke which once my courage tam'd
I, undeceived, at length have slipp'd my head,
And in that sun whose rays my soul enflam'd,
What scraps I rescued at my ease I spread.
So shall I altars to Indifference* raise,

And chaunt without alarm returning freedom's praise.

3.

So on their chains the ransom'd captives dwell;
So carrols one who cured relates his wound;

So slaves of masters, troops of battle tell,

As I my cheerful liberty resound.

Freed, sea and burning fire, from thy controul,
Prison, wound, war, and tyrant of my soul.

4.

'Remain then, faithless friend, thy arts to try
On such as court alternate joy and pain;
For me, I dare her very eyes defy,

I scorn the amorous snare, the pleasing chain,
That held enthrall'd my cheated heart so long,

And charm'd my erring soul unconscious of its wrong.'t

The next of Lope's works in order of time appears to have been La Hermosura de Angelica. What the house of Oedipus and the tale of Troy divine were to the Greeks, the Round Table and the Paladins of France were for many centuries to European literature. The French romancers preferred the British story, and the Italians the French one, whence it happened that, owing to the different characters of the two languages, the greater part of the Round Table romances are in prose, while the Twelve Peers have more frequently been celebrated in verse. Boiardo opened a new vein

* There is no word in our language for desengaño.' + La verde primavera

De mis floridos años

Pasé cautivo, amor, en tus prisiones,
Y en la cadena fiera

Cantando mis engaños,
Lloré con mi razon tus sinrazones;
Amargas confusiones
Del tiempo, que ha tenido
Ciega mi alma, y loco mi sentido!

• Mas ya que el fiero yugo
Que mi cerviz domaba,

Desata el desengaño con tu afrenta,
Y al mismo sol enjugo,
Que un tiempo me abrasabą,

La ropa que saqué de la tormenta,
Con voz libre y esenta
Al desengaño santo

Consagro altares, y alabanzas canto.

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Quanto contento encierra
Contar su herida el sano,

Y en la patria su carcel el cautivo,
Entre la paz la guerra,

Y el libre del tyrano ;

Tanto en cantar mi libertad recibo.
O mar! O fuego vivo!

Que fuiste al alma mia

Herida, carcel, guerra, y tyrania.

Quedate, falso amigo,
Para engañar aquellos

Que siempre estan contentos y quejosos
Que desde aqui maldigo

Los mismos ojos bellos,

Y aquellos lazos dulces y amorosos
Que un tiempo tan hermosos
Tuvieron, aunque injusto,
Asida el alma y engañado el gusto

in this prolific mine; and the success of Ariosto in pursuing it, instead of deterring others, as it ought to have done, from following a poet whom in his own way it was not possible to surpass, made the rhymers of Italy fall to work with redoubled alacrity,-some score of continuations in Italian might be enumerated, and this was only one of the channels into which this great stream of romance was now divided. The Italians had as little interest in Charlemagne as the French in Arthur; but there was a portion of his history which regarded Spain, and which the Spaniards could not but remember with pride. Roncesvalles

that fatal field

'La dove il corno sono tanto forte

Dopo la dolorosa rotta,'-PULCI.

'Where Charlemagne with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabia',-

afforded a theme upon which the Spanish poets delighted to dwell, even as much as upon their victories over the Moors. How popular the ballads and metrical romances upon this subject were in the golden age of Spain, appears from Don Quixote; and among the poems of greater extent, not fewer than six continuations of the Orlando were produced. One of those is the España Defendida, of Christoval Suarez de Figueroa, better known as one of the latest Spanish writers upon American history, but of little merit either as a poet or historian. The work of D. Jeronimo de Urrea is known to collectors merely for its exceeding rarity-being, in truth, as worthless as it is rare. That of Augustin Alonso is still rarer; and has escaped the notice even of Nicolas Antonio. Cervantes has extolled the Lagrimas de Angelica of Luis Barahona de Soto ;Cervantes never was base enough to censure a book because it was written by an enemy, but he has oftentimes committed the more venial injustice of praising one because it was written by a friend. We have never had an opportunity of examining whether his approbation is as ill bestowed here, as it is upon the other works which he commends at the same time, and in the same manner. Lord Holland says this poem has always been esteemed one of the best in the Spanish language. The Bernardo of Bernardo de Balbuena has been more fortunate; after having remained, like the others which have been mentioned, unnoticed and almost unknown, from the time of its publication in 1624, it was re-edited in 1808, by Quintana, well known as one of the best living poets of his country, and better to be remembered hereafter as the author of the most eloquent papers which appeared during the glorious struggle of his countrymen against the French. Balbuena's poem is strongly marked by the characteristic faults of his age and country, but he

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well

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