The gibe was ill-natured, but Espronceda's resentment goes to show that he felt its plausibility. If Toreno meant that Espronceda, like Heine, Musset, Leopardi, and Pushkin, took Byron for a model, he spoke the humble truth. Like Byron, Espronceda became the centre of a legend, and—so to say—he made up for the part. He advertised his criminal repute with manifest gusto, and gave the world his own portrait in the shape of pale, gloomy, splendid heroes. Don Félix de Montemar, in _El Estudiante de Salamanca_, is Don Juan Tenorio in a new environment—"fierce, insolent, irreligious, gallant, haughty, quarrelsome, insult in his glance, irony on his lips, fearing naught, trusting solely to his sword and courage." Again, in the famous declamatory address _To Jarifa_, there is the same disillusioned view of life, the same lust for impossible pleasures, the same picturesque mingling of misanthropy and aspiration. Once more, the Fabio of the fragmentary _Diablo Mundo_ is replenished with the Byronic spirit of defiant pessimism, the Byronic intention of epical mockery. And so throughout all his pieces the protagonist is always, and in all essentials, José de Espronceda. Whether any writer—or, at all events, any but the very greatest—has ever succeeded completely in shedding his own personality is doubtful. Espronceda, at least, never attempted it, and consequently his dramatic pieces—_Doña Blanca de Borbón_, for example—were foredoomed to fail. But this very force of temperament, this very element of artistic egotism, lends life and colour to his songs. The _Diablo Mundo_, the _Estudiante de Salamanca_, ostensibly formed upon the models of Goethe, and Byron, and Tirso de Molina, are utterances of individual impressions, detached lyrics held together by the merest thread. Scarcely a typical Spaniard in life or in art, Espronceda is, beyond all question, the most distinguished Spanish lyrical poet of the century. His abandonment, his attitude of revolt, his love of love and licence—one might even say his turn for debauchery and anarchy—are the notes of an epoch rather than the characteristics of a country; and, in so much, he is cosmopolitan rather than national. But the merciless observation of _El Verdugo_ (The Executioner), the idealised conception of Elvira in _El Estudiante de Salamanca_, are strictly representative of Quevedo's and of Calderón's tradition; while his artificial but sympathetic rhetoric, his resonant music, his brilliant imagery, his uncalculating vehemence, bear upon them the stamp of all his race's faults and virtues. In this sense he speaks for Spain, and Spain repays him by ranking him as the most inspired, if the most unequal, of her modern singers.