He typifies the fluctuations of his time. His natural bent was towards pastoralism, as his early poems, modelled on Garcilaso and on Torre, remain to prove; he took to liberalism at Jove-Llanos' suggestion, as he would have taken to absolutism had that been the craze of the moment; he read Locke, Young, Turgot, and Condorcet at the instance of his friends. "_Obra soy tuya_" ("I am thy handiwork"), he writes to Jove-Llanos. He was ever the handiwork of the last comer: a shadow of insincerity, of pose, is over all his verse. Yet, like his countryman Lucan, Meléndez demonstrates the truth that a worthless creature may be, within limits, a genuine poet. He has neither morals nor ideas; he has fancy, ductility, clearness, music, charm, and a picturesque vision of natural detail that have no counterpart in his period. Compared with his brethren of the Salamancan school—with Diego Tadeo González (1733-94), with José Iglesias de la Casa (1753-91), even with Nicasio Álvarez de Cienfuegos (1764-1809)—Meléndez appears a veritable giant. He was not quite that any more than they were pigmies; but he had a spark of genius, while their faculty was no more than talent.[29] His one distinct failure was when he ventured on the boards with his _Wedding Feast of Camacho_, founded on Cervantes' famous story, though even here the pastoral passages are pleasing, if inappropriate. It is to his credit that his theme is national, while his general dramatic sympathies were, like those of his associates, French. Luzán and his followers found it easier to condemn the ancient masterpieces than to write masterpieces of their own. Their function was negative, destructive; yet when the prohibition of _autos_ was procured in 1765 by José Clavijo y Fajardo (1730-1806)—whose adventure with Louise Caron, Beaumarchais' sister, gave Goethe a subject—they hoped to force a hearing for themselves. They overlooked the fact that there already existed a national dramatist named RAMÓN DE LA CRUZ Y CANO (1731-? 95), who had the merit of inventing a new _genre_, which, being racy of the soil, was to the popular taste. Convention had settled it that tragedies should present the misfortunes of emperors and dukes; that comedies should deal with the middle class, their sentimentalities and foibles. Cruz, a government clerk, with sufficient leisure to compose three hundred odd plays, became in some sort the dramatist of the needy, the disinherited, the have-nots of the street. He might very well sympathise with them, for he was always pinched for money, and died so destitute that his widow had not wherewith to bury him. Beginning, like the rest of the world, with French imitations and renderings, he turned to representing the life about him in short farcical pieces called _sainetes_—a perfect development of the old _pasos_. In the prologue to the ten-volume edition of his _sainetes_ (1786-91), Cruz proclaims his own merit in a just and striking