In person Gongora was tall and robust, his face large, his eyes penetrating and lively, his whole appearance venerable, though severe and adust, hearing marks of the causticity and satire of his disposition, which however softened as he grew older. He was a disappointed man. His talents, his understanding, the grasp of mind of which he felt himself capable, nourished an internal ambition, which being ungratified, turned to discontent. It was some satisfaction to his imperious disposition to found a school of poetry, and attack the chief writers of the day, Cervantes and Lope de Vega, the Argensolas and Quevedo, in reply to their just criticisms on his inflated and tortuous style; and it was balm to his pride to hear the applause of his followers. But it is greatly to his discredit that, while heretofore the disputes of the Spanish poets with regard to literature were conducted with temper, and for the most part with urbanity, Gongora indulged in scurrility and abuse. His excuse, Sedano tells us, is, that this sort of insolence was the fruit of youthful arrogance: yet, as he was a year older than Lope, and contemporary with most of the others, he could not have been so very young when he entered the lists against them. However, as he grew older, visited Madrid, went to court, and took orders, he threw off the presumption he nourished in his native town, and became gentle, humane, and modest, and regretted his former excesses of temper. The terms in which his friends speak of him, prove that the honesty and integrity of his disposition, and his great understanding, inspired them with love and veneration; for, though their language be exaggerated, still it bears marks of sincerity. A friend and disciple writing his life, soon after his death, speaks of him as "the greatest man that not only Spain, but the world ever saw." He laments his brief career, as he names sixty-six years; but his praises being written in the excess of the _culto_ style, it is impossible almost to understand--quite impossible to translate them. In this style the literal translation only offers nonsense: there is a hidden meaning which is to be guessed at, and that, so metaphoric and obscure, that it very much resembles a Chinese puzzle--difficult to put together, and, when, discovered and arranged, not worth the trouble. The _cultoristos_ themselves nourished unbounded contempt for any thing that was at all explicable to common understandings in a common manner.