His contemporary, the Catalan, MANUEL DE CABANYES (1808-1833), died too young to reveal the full measure of his powers, and his _Preludios de mi lira_ (1833), though warmly praised by Torres Amat, Joaquín Roca y Cornet, and other critics of insight, can scarcely be said to have won appreciation. Cabanyes is essentially a poet's poet, inspired mainly by Luis de León. His felicities are those of the accomplished student, the expert in technicalities, the almost impeccable artist whose hendecasyllabics, _Á Cintio_, rival those of Leopardi in their perfect form and intense pessimism; but as his life was too brief, so his production is too frugal and too exquisite for the general, and he is rated by his promise rather than by his actual achievement. Milá y Fontanals and Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo have striven to spread Cabanyes' good report, and they have so far succeeded that his genius is now admitted on all hands; but his chill perfection makes no appeal to the mass of his countrymen. Espronceda's direct successor was JOSÉ ZORRILLA (1817-1893), whose life's story may be read in his own _Recuerdos del tiempo viejo_ (Old-time Memories). It was his misfortune to be concerned in politics, for which he was unfitted, and to be pinched by continuous poverty, which drove him in 1855 to seek his fortune in Mexico, whence he returned empty-handed in 1866. His closing years were somewhat happier, inasmuch as a pension of 30,000 _reales_, obtained at last by strenuous parliamentary effort, freed him from the pressure of actual want. It may be that it came too late, and that Zorrilla's work suffers from his straitened circumstances; but this is difficult to believe. He might have produced less, might have escaped the hopeless hack-work to which he was compelled; but a finished artist he could never have become, for, by instinct as by preference, he was an improvisatore. The tale that (like Arthur Pendennis) he wrote verses to fit engravings is possibly an invention; but the inventor at least knew his man, for nothing is more intrinsically probable.