The useful and the agreeable, in the trivial signification of the terms, are therefore the verbal pivots around which Luzan’s whole poetic theory turns. It is easy to conceive what degree of excellence and truth was to be derived from such principles in their application to Spanish literature. Luzan zealously supported the cause of good taste against the absurdities of the Gongorists.[586] He exposed, without reserve, the weak side of Lope de Vega’s poetry; and the examples he selects from the works of that poet, in order to shew how far they are at variance with nature and reason, prove precisely what they are intended to prove. But to admire genius in its wanderings, and even in many cases to prize those wanderings more than a frigid elegance, required a view of the subject which Luzan’s mind did not embrace. He was precisely the man to detect and enumerate the errors of the favourite poetry of his country; but he wanted the critical eye which would have enabled him to do justice to its beauties. After defining poetry to be an “imitation of nature, either general or particular, made in verse, for utility or amusement, or for both together,”[587] he goes on to say, that little plays of wit, such as sonnets, madrigals, and songs, may sometimes have no other object than agreeable amusement; but that in poetry of a more important kind, such as comedies, tragedies, and epopee, the useful and the agreeable must necessarily be combined together, that is to say, the work must at once instruct and entertain. Accordingly, when he comes to treat more particularly of dramatic poetry, he says, “tragedy is such an imitation of an action as is calculated to correct fear, pity, or other passions; but a comedy must be an action so represented as to inspire love of some virtue, or hatred and abhorrence of some vice or fault.”[588] It is not necessary to particularize the judgments which a critic, armed with these opinions, must have pronounced on the Spanish drama. Luzan not only blamed the Spanish dramatists for the violation of the Aristotelian unities, on the ground that such violation was contrary to nature; but he even condemned as not moral, or at least not sufficiently moral, the genuine nature which he could not avoid recognizing in their works. He, however says, that what is first to be esteemed in the Spanish dramatists, “is in general their ingenious invention, their extraordinary wit and judgment, admirable and essential qualities in great poets. Lope de Vega merits particular praise for the natural facility of his style, and the adroit way in which he has in many of his comedies painted the customs and the character of certain persons. I admire in Calderon the dignity of his language, which without ever being obscure or affected is always elegant.”[589] He proceeds to eulogize the art of ingenious developement displayed in Calderon’s dramas of intrigue; and attributes a similar merit to some of the comedies of Antonio de Solis and Moretto.