While Lope on these occasions, and on many others, takes occasion to reprehend and satirise this new system, his disciples held it up as the wonder of the world; they called it the _estilo culto_, or refined style, and themselves _cultoristos_: each phrase was to be twisted, each word to receive a new and deeper meaning, while mythology, and all sorts of phantastic imagery, gave a bombastic gilding to the whole; and when they had written verses high in sound, but obscure and simple in meaning, they fancied they had arrived at sublimity. Thus, a petty hill assumes the proportions of a mountain in the evening mist. We may look at it with wonder, we may lose our way or tumble into a ditch in endeavouring to reach it; but; once at its summit, and we find ourselves scarcely elevated above the plain. The "Polyphemus" and the "Solitudes" of Gongora, are, as has been mentioned, the poems written in his most exaggerated style. The "Polyphemus" begins with a description of the giant, who "was a mountain of members eminent." His dark hair was a "knotty imitation of the turbid waves of Lethe; and, as the wind combs them stormily, they fly dishevelled, or hang down disordered: his beard is a torrent, the dried-up offspring of this Pyrenees! Trinacria has no wild beast in its mountains armed with such cruelty, shod with such wind, whose ferocity can defend, nor whose speed may save! Their skins, spotted with a hundred colours, are his cloak; and thus he drives in his oxen to their stall, treading the doubtful light of morn." His "Soledades" or "Solitudes," commence even more in the _estilo culto_, and with such very refined phrases and images that no one can make any thing of it. We give a short passage with Sismondi's translation, and the Spanish, that the reader may judge in what a jungle of interminable words, and heterogeneous ideas, this mistaken poet lost himself:--