This involved him in a bitter controversy, which probably shortened his life. Prominent among his enemies was the Basque, FÉLIX MARÍA DE SAMANIEGO (1745-1801), whose early education was entirely French, and who regarded Lope much as Voltaire regarded Shakespeare. Though Huerta's intemperance lost him his cause, Samaniego's real triumph was in another field than that of controversy. His _Fábulas_ (1781-94), mostly imitations or renderings of Phædrus, La Fontaine, and Gay, are almost the best in their kind—simple, clear, and forcible. A year earlier than Samaniego, the Jesuit Lasala, of Bologna, had translated the fables of Lukmān al-Hakīm into Latin, and, in 1784, Miguel García Asensio published a Castilian version. It does not appear that Samaniego knew anything of Lasala, nor was he disturbed by García Asensio's translation. Before the latter was in print, he was annoyed at finding himself rivalled by TOMÁS DE IRIARTE Y OROPESA (1750-91), who had begun his career as a prose translator of Molière and Voltaire, and had charmed—or at least had drawn effusive compliments from—Metastasio with a frigid poem, _La Música_ (1780). In the following year Iriarte published his _Fábulas literarias_, putting the versified apologue to doctrinal uses, censuring literary faults, and expounding what he held to be true doctrine. He took most pride in his plays, _El Señorito mimado_ and _La Señorita mal criada_; yet the Spoiled Young Gentleman and the Ill-bred Young Lady are forgotten—somewhat unjustly—by all but students, while the wit and polish of the fables have earned their author an excessive fame. Iriarte was, in the best sense, an "elegant" writer. Unluckily for himself and us, much of his short life was, after the eighteenth-century fashion, wasted in polemics with able, learned ruffians, of whom Juan Pablo Forner (1756-97) is the most extreme type. Forner's versified attack on Iriarte, _El Asno erudito_, is one of the most ferocious libels ever printed. Literary men the world over are famous for their manners: Spain is in this respect no better than her neighbours, and the abusive personalities which form a great part of her literary history during the last century are now the driest, most vacant chaff imaginable.