Aragón; Tirso de Molina, Ruiz de Alarcón, and Rojas Zorrilla filled the theatres with their brilliant and ingenious fancies; the incorruptible satirist, Quevedo, was private secretary to the King; the boyish Calderón was growing into repute and royal favour. Of the Aragonese playwright, Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola, we have already spoken in a previous chapter. His brother, BARTOLOMÉ LEONARDO DE ARGENSOLA (1562-1631), took orders, and, through the influence of the Duque de Villahermosa, was named rector of the town whence his patron took his title. His earliest work, the _Conquista de las Islas Molucas_ (1609), written by order of the Conde de Lemos, is uncritical in conception and design; but the matter of its primitive, romantic, and even sentimental legends derives fresh charm from the author's apt and polished narrative. In 1611 he and his brother accompanied Lemos to Naples, thereby stirring the anger of Cervantes, who had hoped to be among the Viceroy's suite, as appears from a passage in the _Viaje del Parnaso_, which roundly insinuates that the Argensolas were a pair of intriguers. The disappointment was natural; yet posterity is even grateful for it, since a transfer to Naples would certainly have lost us the second _Don Quixote_. Doubtless the Argensolas, who were of Italian descent, were better fitted than Cervantes for commerce with Italian affairs, and Bartolomé made friends on all sides in Naples as in Rome. On his brother's death in 1613, he became official chronicler of Aragón, and, in 1631, published a sequel to _Zurita_, the _Anales de Aragón_, which deals so minutely with the events of the years 1516-20 as to become wearisome, despite all Argensola's grace of manner. The _Rimas_ of the two brothers, published posthumously in 1634 by Lupercio's son, Gabriel Leonardo de Albión, was stamped with the approval of the dictator, Lope de Vega, who declared that the authors "had come from Aragón to reform among our poets the Castilian language, which is suffering from new horrible phrases, more puzzling than enlightening." This is an overstatement of a truth, due to Lope's aversion from Gongorism in all its shapes. Horace is the model of the Argensolas, whose renderings of the two odes _Ibam forte via sacra_ and _Beatus ille_ are among the happiest of versions. Their sobriety of thought is austere, and their classic correctness of diction is in curious contrast with the daring innovations of their time. Lupercio has a polite, humorous fancy, which shows through Mr. Gibson's translation of a well-known sonnet:—