The last years of Ercilla's life were spent in obscurity. The disappointments he had met with engendered a spirit of gloomy devotion, to which his countrymen were, in those days, peculiarly liable.[49] His morals in his juvenile years had been loose, as is proved by the circumstance of his having had a numerous illegitimate offspring. He now bitterly repented of his frailties; and lamented that he had devoted the best years of his life to worldly pursuits and vanities.[50] The year of his death is not known. In 1596 he was still alive, and is said to have been engaged in writing a poem to commemorate the exploits of Don Alvaro Bazan, marquis of Santa Cruz, the bravest and most fortunate of the Spanish naval commanders. This work, if it ever existed, has been lost; and Ercilla is only known in the literary world by his poem La Araucana, and by a few lines printed in the Parnaso Español[51], which, though they were highly extolled by Lope de Vega, certainly do no credit to his poetical powers. Respecting Ercilla's personal character we possess little information. He appears to have been brave, active, and clever, of an adventurous disposition, impatient of control, restless and querulous. That he, like most of the literary men of Spain, was shamefully neglected by his own countrymen, is an incontrovertible fact. In his account of the Indian war, and of his own share in the events of it, he shows himself to have been actuated by a more liberal spirit, towards the aboriginal natives, than was evinced by the generality of his fellow-soldiers and fellow-writers. That this arose from his discontent has been malignantly asserted by his enemies, but without sufficient evidence. The execution of Caupolican, the Indian general, which he so indignantly condemns, was a fact of glaring and atrocious injustice, though, unfortunately, of a class by no means uncommon, not only in the annals of Spanish warfare in those regions, but in the history of all conquests; where the assertion of independence has been held and treated as rebellion, and punishment the more severely inflicted in proportion as the right to inflict it was more doubtful or untenable. But as the name of Ercilla belongs rather to the literary than to the political history of Spain, the qualities of his poetry demand our attention in preference to the actions of his life. The Araucana, though often quoted, is little known out of Spain. No English version of it has been published, but it is stated in an article in the Quarterly Review[52], that there exists one in manuscript from the pen of Mr. Boyd, known as one of the English translators of Dante. The writer of Ercilla's life, in the French Biographie Universelle, speaks of a French translation by M. Langlès, also unpublished. We are not aware that either the Italians or the Germans, the latter of whom have latterly directed their attention to Castilian poetry, possess any complete translation of that Spanish poem.