Herrera endeavoured, by other means than poetical composition, to give to the national taste of the Spaniards a direction conformable to his own principles. He wrote a “Critical Commentary on the Poems of Garcilaso de la Vega.”[223] This commentary has served as a model for many similar works, which have been the means of circulating various kinds of useful knowledge without having contributed in any remarkable degree to the advancement of taste. Herrera, as a theorist, failed to establish any fixed point or station from which he might have taken a clear and consistent view of the whole region of poetry. His criticism everlastingly turns on detached ideas and words; and whenever opportunities for displaying his learning occur, he digresses into all the regions of philosophy and literature. Of the indistinctness of his notions, relative to the different species of poetry, some idea may be formed from his definition of the elegy. He says--“an elegy should be simple, soft, tender, amiable, terse, clear, and if it may be so called, noble; affecting to the feelings, and moving them in every way; neither very inflated nor very humble, nor obscured by affected phrases or far-fetched fables.”[224] LUIS DE LEON. Luis Ponce de Leon, the next lyric poet to be noticed, pursued a course very different from that of Herrera, whose contemporary he was. He is usually called, by abbreviation, merely Luis de Leon, and did not obtain the surname of divine, to which, however, he might have laid claim with infinitely more justice than Herrera, if his pious humility would have permitted him to entertain the idea of maintaining any competition for earthly honours.[225]