But he was not fitted to maintain the leadership which circumstances had allotted to him, and romanticism found a more popular exponent in Ángel de Saavedra, DUQUE DE RIVAS (1791-1865), the very type of the radical noble. His exile in France and in England converted him from a follower of Meléndez and Quintana to a sectary of Chateaubriand and Byron. His first essays in the new vein were an admirable lyric, _Al faro de Malta_, and _El Moro expósito_, a narrative poem undertaken by the advice of John Hookham Frere. Brilliant passages of poetic diction, the semi-epical presentation of picturesque national legends, are Rivas' contribution to the new school. He went still further in his famous play, _Don Álvaro_ (1835), an event in the history of the modern Spanish drama corresponding to the production of _Hernani_ at the Théâtre Français. The characters of Álvaro, of Leonor, and of her brother Alfonso Vargas are, if not inhuman, all but titanic, and the speeches are of such magniloquence as man never spoke. But for the Spaniards of the third decade, Rivas was the standard-bearer of revolt, and _Don Álvaro_, by its contempt for the unities, by its alternation of prose with lyrism, by its amalgam of the grandiose, the comic, the sublime, and the horrible, enchanted a generation of Spanish playgoers surfeited with the academic drama. To English readers of Mr. Gladstone's essay, the Canon of Seville, JOSÉ MARÍA BLANCO (1775-1841), is familiar by the alias of Blanco White. It were irrelevant to record here the lamentable story of Blanco's private life, or to follow his religious transformations from Catholicism to Unitarianism. A sufficient idea of his poetic gifts is afforded by an English quatorzain which has found favour with many critics:— "_Mysterious night! When our first parent knew Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue? Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus, with the host of heaven, came, And lo! Creation widened in man's view. Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O Sun? or who could find, Whilst fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed, That to such countless orbs thou madest us blind? Why do we then shun death with anxious strife? If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?_"