"I have known this gentleman for eight-and-twenty years, and I hold him to be possessed of the rarest and most excellent talent of any in Cordova, so that he need not yield even to Seneca or Lucan, who were natives of the same town. Pedro Linan de Riaza, his contemporary at Salamanca, told me much of his proficiency in study, so that I cultivated his acquaintance, and improved it by the intercourse we had when I visited Andalusia; and it always appeared as if he liked and esteemed me more than my poor merits deserve. Many other distinguished men of letters at that time competed with him:--Herrera, Vicente Espinel, the two Argensolas, and others, among whom this gentleman held such place, that Fame said the same of him as the Delphic oracle did of Socrates. "He wrote in all styles with elegance, and in gay and festive compositions his wit was not less celebrated than Martial's, while it was far more decent. We have several of his works composed in a pure style, which he continued for the greater part of his life. But, not content with having reached the highest step of fame in sweetness and softness, he sought (I have always believed with good and sincere intentions, and not with presumption, as his enemies have asserted), to enrich the art, and even language, with such ornaments and figures as were never before imagined nor seen. In my opinion he fulfilled his aim, if this was his intent; the difficulty rests in receiving his system: and so many obstacles have arisen, that I doubt they will never cease, except with their cause; for I think the obscurity and ambiguity of his expressions must be disagreeable to many. By some he is said to have raised this new style into a peculiar class of poetry; and they are not mistaken: for, as in the old manner of writing, it took a life to become a poet, in this new one it requires but a day: for, with these transpositions, four rules, and six Latin words or emphatic phrases, they rise so high that they do not know--far less understand themselves. Lipsius wrote a new Latin, which those who are learned in such things say Cicero and Quintilian laugh at in the other world; and those who have imitated him are so wise that they lose themselves. And I know others who have invented a language and style so different from Lipsius that they require a new dictionary. And thus those who imitate this gentleman produce monstrous births--and fancy that, by imitating his style, they inherit his genius. Would to God they imitated him in that part which is worthy of adoption; for every one must be aware that there is much that is deserving of admiration, while the rest is wrapt in the darkness of such ambiguity as I have found the cleverest men at fault when they tried to understand it. The foundation of this edifice is transposition, rendered the more harsh by the disjoining of substantives from adjectives, where no parenthesis is possible, so that even to