Eminent literary and scientific men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Vol. 3 (of 3)Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
History
Eminent literary and scientific men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Vol. 3 (of 3)
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Authors -- Biography; Scientists -- Biography
Gil Polo, a native of Valentia, flourished about the year 1550. He
continued the Diana of Montemayor, and called his work "La Diana
Enamorada." He is chiefly famous for the praise that Cervantes bestows
on him, when in "Don Quixote" the curate says to the barber "Take as
much care of Gil Polo's work, as if it were written by Apollo himself."
Posterity has not confirmed this preference, and it is chiefly praised
for elegance and purity of style.
Cetina, an anacreontic poet of merit, also finds a place in the "Parnaso
Español." The same honour is not bestowed on Castillejo, who, however,
deserves peculiar mention as the great partisan of the old Castilian
style, and the antagonist of Boscan. Cristoval Castillejo flourished
also in the time of Charles V., in whose service he went to Vienna,
remaining there as secretary to Ferdinand I.; as, notwithstanding, the
imperial crown of Germany was separated from the regal one of Spain, on
the death of Charles V., there continued to subsist for some years
intimate relations between the courts of Vienna and Madrid. The greater
part of Castillejo's poems were written at Vienna, and are full of
allusions to the gaieties of the court. He admired and celebrates a
young German lady, named Schomburg, whose barbaric appellation he
translates into Xomburg. Late in life he returned to Spain, became a
Cistercian monk, and died in a convent in 1596.
Some Spanish critics raise Castillejo to a high rank among the poets of
that nation, while others give him a juster place, and perceive that it
was the want of strength to soar beyond, that led him, in his own
compositions, to confine himself to the old coplas, and want of
penetration that made him so violent an enemy of those whom he named the
Petrarquistas. His satires against them are witty, and not without some
justice; and certainly prolixity is a fault to be attributed to these
poets he attacks. He begins with the true Spanish taste for persecution,
exclaiming,--
As the holy Inquisition
Is apt, with saintly diligence,
To make eager perquisition,
And punish too with violence,
Each novel heresy and sect,
I would that it were found correct
To castigate in native Spain
A heresy as bad as any
That Luther, to our grief and pain,
Has introduced in Germany.
The Anabaptists' crime they share,
And well deserve their punishment:
Petrarchists--the new name they bear,
Which they assume with bad intent;
And they are renegades most fierce
To the old Castilian measure;
Believing in Italian verse.
Finding there more grace and pleasure.[30]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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