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MS has not survived. Previously published: Monthly Magazine, 2 (December 1796), 859–862 [from where the text is taken] under pseudonym ‘T.Y.’. For attribution to Southey, see Kenneth Curry, ‘Southey’s contributions to The Monthly Magazine and The Athenaeum’, The Wordsworth Circle, 11 (1980), 215.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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IF LAVATERmonstruosidad, a word which must literally be rendered monstruosity:
no other term could so well have delineated it. Lope de Vega is never sublime,
seldom pathetic, and seldom natural; rarely above mediocrity in any of his
writings, he has attained to celebrity by their number.
Purity of language and harmonious versification distinguish all
the poems of this indefatigable Spaniard. Born and educated at Madrid, if he had
beheld no stream but the Manzanares, and no country but the melancholy plains of
Castille, we might have expected dullness; but the secretary and favourite of
the duke of Alva
When a school-boy, he bartered his verses with his school-fellows, for hymns and prints: when a young man, he wrote eclogues, and a comedy, in praise of the Grand Inquisitor; and a pastoral, in honour of the duke of Alva. From these symptoms, one who knew the human heart might have prophesied, that the young poet never would attain to excellence. The Dutch idea of bartering his verses could not have entered the mind of the enthusiast: the young enthusiast carefully conceals his feelings from observation, and he who is not an enthusiast must never expect to be a poet.
Were it not for the reverence which fashion has attached to their names, we should yawn over Virgil and Horace, when they prostitute poetry to panegyric. No great or good man ever encouraged a rhymer to bespatter him with praise; panegyric has, therefore, usually been employed on the weak and the wicked, on those whom we despise and detest; but, among the villains whose deeds pollute the page of history, the duke of Alva ranks in the first class. This man united in himself the bigotry of the priest, the duplicity of the politician, and the brutality of the soldier; and to this man did Lope de Vega write a pastoral! Arcadia and the duke of Alva! Madness never produced a more monstrous association!
The Arcadia of Lope de Vega is one of the innumerable imitations
that swarmed in Spain, after George of Montemayor published his Diana.
I never toiled through the Arcadia of Lope de Vega. After
penetrating some thirty or forty pages into the little volume, I found that a
few scattered conceits could not atone for its intolerable dullness. Great
strength of imagination only can reconcile the reader to a total want to taste,
but the imagination of this indefatigable Spaniard was not strong, and his taste
may be judged of by a sentence relating to the heroine of his Arcadia: “the rays
of Belisarda’s eyes shone upon the water like the reflection of the sun upon a
looking-glass.”
Of his longer poems, I have never seen the Jerusalen
Conquistada:
Diogo de Sousa, in his celebrated satire called the Journey of
Diogo Camacho to Parnassus,
His comedies are said to delineate characters well, and
faithfully to represent the manners of the age he lived in. This commendation
they could not have obtained without, in some degree, meriting it; and there is
a liveliness in the lighter pieces of Lope de Vega, which shows him best
qualified for such subjects. He himself excuses his total neglect of all
dramatic rules, by alledging the taste of the age. “I have written better (says
he); “but seeing what monstrous productions please the women and the mob, I have
locked up all my precepts, and turned Plautus and Terence out of my library.
Surely it is just that, as the public pay, the public should be pleased.”
The burlesque pieces of this universal author were published by
him, under the name of the Licentiate Thome de Burguillos, perhaps, because he
thought them little consonant to his ecclesiastical character; perhaps, because
he was ashamed of a species of poetry so despicable.
The Spanish poets appear to have been little envious of each
other’s reputation. In his Laurel de Apolo, Lope de Vega has liberally praised
his contemporaries; and poems of the same nature have been composed by Gil Polo,
Vicente Espinel, and the great Cervantes.
I have read nearly two hundred of his sonnets. As might be
expected, many of them contain parts that are beautiful; none of them are
perfect as wholes. The following is a fair specimen:
On the 25th of August 1635, died Lope de Vega, in the 73d year of his age; full of honours as of days. If not the best of poets, he was the most fortunate; the wealth he acquired rendered him happy in life, and the use he made of it cheered him in death. He died honoured by the great, celebrated by the learned, and regretted by the poor. His reputation still flourishes in his own country; and though the impartial judgment of foreigners cannot rank his productions above mediocrity, let it be remembered, that he never was excelled in industry as an author, or in liberality as a man.
The following sonnet may serve to show in what estimation he was
held by his co-temporaries: it is by Antonio Barbosa Bacellar,
ON THE DEATH OF LOPE DE VEGA.