spirit; but on this point it is hard to judge, inasmuch as his pupil and editor, Eugenio de Llaguno y Amírola (a strong French partisan, who translated Racine's _Athalie_ in 1754), is suspected of tampering with this text, as he adulterated that of Díaz Gámez' _Crónica del Conde de Buelna_. Luzán's destructive criticisms are always acute, and are generally just. Lope is for him a genius of amazing force and variety, while Calderón is a singer of exquisite music. With this ingratiating prelude, he has no difficulty in exposing their most obvious defects, and his attack on Gongorism is delivered with great spirit. It is in construction that he fails: as when he avers that the ends of poetry and moral philosophy are identical, that Homer was a didactic poet expounding political and transcendental truths to the vulgar, that epics exist for the instruction of monarchs and military chiefs, that the period of a play's action should correspond precisely with the time that the play takes in acting. Luzán's rigorous logic ends by reducing to absurdity the didactic theories of the eighteenth century; yet, for all his logic, he had a genuine love of poetry, which induced him to neglect his abstract rules. It is true that he scarcely utters a proposition which is not contradicted by implication in other parts of his treatise. Nevertheless, his book has both a literary and an historic value. Written in excellent style and temper, with innumerable parallels from many literatures, the _Poética_ served as a manifesto which summoned Spain to fall into line with academic Europe; and Spain, among the least academic because among the most original of countries, ended by obeying. Her old inspiration had passed away with her wide dominion, and Luzán deserves credit for lending her a new opportune impulse.