If a comprehensive view be taken of the merits of Boscan, it will be impossible, notwithstanding the striking faults which appear in his works, and particularly in his sonnets, to withhold from him the title of the first classical poet of Spain. Some of his expressions are now antiquated, but upon the whole his language has continued a model for succeeding ages. Simplicity and dignity had never, in the same degree, and under a form so correct, been united with poetic truth and feeling by any previous Spanish author. The partizans of the old national poetry reproached him with being an imitator; but without the kind of imitation by which he naturalized in his language a taste for the literature of Italy and the ancient classics, it would have been impossible for Spanish poetry to have gained that field in which it afterwards competed with the Italian. That he did not obtrude upon his countrymen a kind of poetry irreconcilable with the genius of the language and the national character, is evident from the rapidity with which the new taste spread over the whole of Spain, and extended into Portugal, and from its duration in both kingdoms. The poetic innovators, at whose head Boscan stood, were certainly blameable, in so far as they wished to banish entirely the ancient Spanish style, which was also, in its own manner, susceptible of classical improvement. But it is doubtful whether the partizans of that style would have thought of perfecting it after classical models, had not the disciples of the Italian school unexpectedly shewn the high cultivation of which Spanish poetry was capable under new forms. This Boscan first made manifest, not by critical reasoning, but by example; and his modesty contributed not a little to attract to his party the more liberal minded of his countrymen. Had he commenced his reform by trying to beat down the old style with theoretical argument, or egotistical declamation, he would only have rendered himself an object of ridicule; for the public he had to deal with was not indisposed to improvement, but would not submit to have lessons read to it magisterially. After Boscan, his friends, who participated in the fame of that reform to which he shewed the way, are justly entitled to the next place in the history of Spanish poetry. GARCILASO DE LA VEGA.