Góngora lived long enough to know that he had triumphed. Tirso de Molina and Calderón, with most of the younger dramatists, show the _culto_ influence in many plays; Jáuregui forgot his own principles, and accepted the new mode; even Lope himself, in passages of his later writings, yielded to preciosity. Quevedo began by quoting Epictetus's aphorism:—_Scholasticum esse animal quod ab omnibus irridetur_. And he renders the Latin in his own free style:—"The _culto_ brute is a general laughing-stock." But the "_culto_ brute" smiled to see Quevedo given over to _conceptismo_, an affectation not less disastrous in effect than Góngora's own. Meanwhile enthusiastic champions declared for the Córdoban master. Martín de Ángulo y Pulgar published his _Epístolas satisfactorias_ (1635) in answer to the censures of the learned Francisco de Cascales; Pellicer preached the Gongoristic gospel in his _Lecciones solemnes_ (1630); the _Defence of the Fable of Pyramus and Thisbe_ fills a quarto by Cristóbal de Salazar Mardones (1636); García de Salcedo Coronel's huge commentaries (1636-46) are perhaps, more obscure than anything in his author's text; and, so far away as Peru, Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Rector of Cuzco, published an _Apologético en favor de Don Luis de Góngora, Príncipe de los Poetas Lyricos de España_ (1694). There came a day when, as Salazar y Torres informs us, the _Polifemo_ and the _Soledades_ were recited on Speech-Day by the boys in Jesuit schools. It took Spain a hundred years to rid her veins of the Gongoristic poison, and Gongorism has now become, in Spain itself, a synonym for all that is bad in literature. Undoubtedly Góngora did an infinite deal of mischief: his tricks of transposition were too easily learned by those hordes of imitators who see nothing but the obvious, and his verbal audacities were reproduced by men without a tithe of his taste and execution. And yet, though it be an unpopular thing to confess, one has a secret sympathy with him in his campaign. Lope de Vega and Cervantes are as unlike as two men may be; but they are twins in their slapdash methods, in their indifference to exquisiteness of form. Their fatal facility is common to their brethren: threadbare phrase, accepted without thought and repeated without heed, is, as often as not, the curse of the best Spanish work. It was, perhaps, not altogether love of notoriety which seduced Góngora into Carrillo's ways. He had, as his earliest work proves, a sounder method than his fellows and a purer artistic conscience. No trace of carelessness is visible in his juvenile poems, written in an obscurity which knew no encouragement. It is just to believe that his late ambition was not all self-seeking, and that he aspired to renew, or rather to enlarge, the poetic diction of his country.