It is a striking fact that the great national poet of the War of Independence should be indisputably French in all but patriotic sentiment. MANUEL JOSÉ QUINTANA (1772-1857) was an offshoot of the Salamancan school, a friend of Jove-Llanos and of Meléndez Valdés, a follower of Raynal and Turgot and Condorcet, a "philosopher" of the eighteenth-century model. Too much stress has, perhaps, been laid on his French constructions, his acceptance of neologisms: a more radical fault is his incapacity for ideas. Had he died at forty his fame would be even greater than it is; for in his last years he did nothing but repeat the echoes of his youth. At eighty he was still perorating on the rights of man, as though the world were a huge Jacobin Convention, as though he had learned and forgotten nothing during half a century He died, as he had lived, convinced that a few changes of political machinery would ensure a perpetual Golden Age. It is not for his _Duque de Viseo_, a tragedy based on M. G. Lewis's _Castle Spectre_, nor by his _Ode to Juan de Padilla_, that Quintana is remembered. The partisan of French ideas lives by his _Call to Arms against the French_, by his patriotic campaign against the invaders, by his prose biographies of the Cid, the Great Captain, Pizarro, and other Spaniards of the ancient time. We might suspect, if we did not know, Quintana's habit of writing his first rough drafts in prose, and of translating these into verse. Though he proclaimed himself a pupil of Meléndez, nature and love are not his true themes, and his versification is curiously unequal. Patriotism, politics, philanthropy are his inspirations, and these find utterance in the lofty rhetoric of such pieces as his _Ode to Guzmán the Good_ and the _Ode on the Invention of Printing_. Unequal, unrestrained, never exquisite, never completely admirable for more than a few lines at a time, Quintana's passionate pride of patriotism, his virile temperament, his individual gift of martial music have enabled him to express with unsurpassed fidelity one very conspicuous aspect of his people's genius.