Vicente Espinel was born at Ronda, a city of Granada, in the year 1544. He was of poor parentage, and left his native town early to seek his fortunes. A countryman, don Francisco Pacheco, bishop of Malaga, so far favoured as to ordain him, and he became a beneficiary of the church at Ronda. He sought better preferment at court, but met with no success, either in his own native place nor out of it. In Ronda itself he had enemies, who pursued him with such calumnies and malignity that he withdrew into a sort of voluntary exile, which, loving Granada as he did, he bitterly lamented. He was at first a friend, and then an attacker, of Cervantes, which circumstance does not redound to his credit.[105] Lope de Vega speaks of his poetry with the approbation it deserved. He was a musician as well as a poet, and added a fifth string to the Spanish guitar. He died poor and in obscurity at Madrid, in 1634, in the ninetieth year of his age. He describes himself in some spirited and comic verses, as singularly ugly--a tub with a priest's cap at top, a monster of fat;--large face, short neck, short arms, each hand looking like a tortoise, slow of foot: "whoever sees me," he says, "so fat and reverend-looking, might think that I were a rich and idle epicure.--What a pretty figure for a poet!" Another writer of the natural school; named the Anacreon of Spain, more easy, sweet and spirited even than Vicente Espinel, was Estévan Manuel de Villegas. He was born in the city of Nagera of Naxera, in the province or Rioja, in Old Castile, in the year 1595. He was of a noble and distinguished family. He spent his boyish years at Madrid. At fourteen he was entered in the university of Salamanca, and studied the law. His tastes inclined him, however, to the more agreeable parts of literature: he was a proficient in Latin and Greek; and, at fourteen, translated from Anacreon and Horace; and at the same time wrote original anacreontics, which he published in 1618, in his twenty-third year.