A detailed account of the life of this distinguished man, cannot be regarded as a biographical excrescence in a history of Spanish Literature; for in no other poet’s life and works is the real Castilian spirit of the age of Charles V. so clearly displayed as in those of Diego de Mendoza. The universality of his literary talent will be best understood, when it is known with what energy, precision, and facility he accommodated himself to, and controuled the circumstances in which he happened to be placed in all the practical relations of life. That trait too in the portrait of his mind, which is most worthy of observation, namely, the constancy with which, instead of abandoning one species of mental activity for another, he continued throughout the different periods of his life, from youth to extreme old age, always to unite in his person the poet, the man of letters, and the statesman, gives reason to expect that his works, however differing in kind, will be found to possess a certain common character. Diego de Mendoza did more for the poetic literature of his country than his countrymen seem to have acknowledged. Spanish writers, it is true, place him next in rank to Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega, among the poets who introduced the Italian style into Castilian poetry. But they cannot pardon the harshness of his versification in those poems in which he adopted the metrical forms of Italy. Rendered fastidious by the rhythmical harmony which a Castilian ear can never dispense with, the Spaniards have held in very trifling estimation the epistles of Mendoza; though those compositions, in a striking manner, extended the boundaries of Castilian poetry. As an epistolary poet, he might justly be styled the Spanish Horace, if his tercets flowed as smoothly as the hexameters of the latin poet. Making allowance, however, for the want of that pure harmony and that didactic delicacy in which Horace is inimitable, Mendoza’s epistles may rank among the best productions of the kind in modern literature. With the exception of Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega, no Spanish poet had evinced any traces of that horatian spirit with which this author was endowed. In the collection of Mendoza’s poems, these epistles are merely called _cartas_ (letters.) Some of them are of a romantic cast, and overloaded with tedious love complaints. But the rest, like Horace’s epistles, are didactic, full of agreeable but sound philosophy, precise and yet unconstrained in expression, and rescued from the monotonous effect of moral instruction, by a happy interchange of precepts, images, and characters. A masculine understanding, which clearly penetrates all social relations, and a noble spirit, which estimates the blessings of life according to their real value, diffuse over these epistles a charm at once serene and attractive. Some of the most beautiful, for example, that addressed to Boscan, which is best known, and which on