One of the first who openly attacked the party of the Gallicists, was the patriotic Vicente Garcia de la Huerta, a member of the Spanish academy, and librarian to the king. None but a man whose literary judgments were accredited by the same honourable posts which gave peculiar weight to those of the Gallicists, could at that time hope to oppose with success the fashionable opinion concerning Spanish literature. La Huerta, however, undertook a dangerous task, for with every talent and right feeling for genuine poetry, he was by no means a skilful critic. In systematic coolness of judgment he was incompetent to enter the lists with men of Luzan’s critical ability. The true principles on which Spanish poetry was to be defended against French criticism, were at that period not at all understood; and La Huerta was not the man to discover them. But his feeling acted in the place of his judgment. It groped on when abandoned by theory, and rejected every theory to which it could not be reconciled. Conscious of his deficiency, La Huerta was extremely diffident whenever his opinions came into collision with those of Luzan and other academicians. But when his task was to reply to the observations of French critics, his patriotic enthusiasm knew no bounds. In exercising the law of retaliation, he attacked the admired Coryphæi of the French Parnassus with a grossness which would cast a stigma on his reputation for taste, did not his other works sufficiently prove him to have been unjust, only through the excess of a just indignation. Fortunately for La Huerta, it was not until his works had obtained decided credit that he openly avowed his hostility to the Gallicists. Among the poems which first conferred celebrity on his name, is a piscatory eclogue, which he read at a distribution of academic prizes in the year 1760. This purely occasional effusion is written in the national lyric style of the eclogues of the best period of Spanish poetry, and is free from orientalisms.[602] Three years afterwards, on a similar occasion, he read a mythological poem in stanzas. These were succeeded by other poems, also of occasional origin, by which La Huerta disarmed the critics, who might have been disposed to assert that he was destitute of the necessary feeling for French elegance. The romances by which he sought to give to that style of national poetry a new existence in the elegant world, seem to have been written at various periods of his life. Besides lyric romances, which had not entirely lost their ancient consideration, he composed narrative romances in the old style. In one of the latter compositions his success is remarkable.[603] He likewise revived the Spanish custom of composing poetic glosses; and some of his sonnets deserve the highest praise. That he was well acquainted with latin and French poetry is evident from his metrical translations of some of Horace’s odes, and of several fragments from the works of the French poets.[604]