Voltaire was the first, amongst the French, who called the attention of his countrymen to the Araucana. In his very indifferent Essay upon Epic Poetry, he praises the speech of Colocolo in the 2d canto, which he places above that of Nestor in the first book of the Iliad, and says that the remainder of the work is as barbarous as the nations of which it treats.[53] Of the excellence of the speech so praised (without meaning to enter into a comparison with Homer) no doubt can exist, and the judgment passed upon it by Voltaire deserves the more to be relied upon, as, according to Bouterwek's acute remark[54], he was a better judge of rhetorical than of poetical excellence. The unqualified condemnation of the rest of the poem cannot, indeed, be assented to; for, though the Araucana is far from being a work of first-rate merit, yet it contains some manly beauties, which Voltaire's notions of poetry rendered him unable to perceive. [Note 9.] In an article of Moreri's Dictionnaire we find a more just though still a severe criticism of Ercilla's poem. Latterly the writer in the Biographic Universelle already quoted has expressed a more favourable opinion of the Araucana, and has perhaps erred on the other side. [Note 10.] It is to Hayley that the English are indebted for a knowledge of the work in question: his analysis and partial translations of it, and his eulogium upon the author, are contained in the notes and body of his Essay upon Epic Poetry. [Note 11.] Hayley thought of Ercilla, perhaps, more highly than he deserves; though, upon the whole, his notice of the Araucana is judicious. In his translations he was not quite so felicitous: his prosaic style was not ill calculated to give a just notion of the tenour of the Spanish poet's composition; but he wanted that force of expression which constitutes the highest recommendation of Ercilla's poetry. The translator, besides, adopted the couplet, a very improper medium to convey to an English reader a just notion of a work originally written in the stanza. It would be needless to point out to those who are acquainted with the Spenserian stanza, or with the Italian and Spanish octava, so happily adopted by Fairfax in his Tasso, how far the mechanism of this measure affects the original conception and distribution of the poet's thoughts, and how much the structure of the couplet differs from it; whence it follows, as a necessary consequence, that conceptions originally adapted to the former must appear distorted when brought by a forced adaptation to the latter. From the discordant opinions of critics of all nations respecting the Araucana, we may safely infer that, although its defects may be great and numerous, and although even in the Castilian language it cannot be esteemed a first-rate poem, still it possesses just pretensions to a rank in literature above that which some would assign to it.