But whatever may have been his own feelings on the suitableness of such an occupation to his profession, it is certain, that, while most of the poems he has left us were written in his youth, they were not collected by him till the latter part of his life, and then only to please a personal friend, who never thought of publishing them; so that they were not printed at all till forty years after his death, when Quevedo gave them to the public, in the hope that they might help to reform the corrupted taste of the age. But from this time they have gone through many editions, though still they never appeared properly collated and arranged till 1816.[75] [75] The poems of Luis de Leon fill the last volume of his Works; but there are several among them that are probably spurious. They are, however, of great value. They consist of versions of all the Eclogues and two of the Georgics of Virgil, about thirty Odes of Horace, about forty Psalms, and a few passages from the Greek and Italian poets; all executed with freedom and spirit, and all in a genuinely Castilian style. His translations, however, seem to have been only in the nature of exercises and amusements. But though he thus acquired great facility and exactness in his versification, he wrote little. His original poems fill no more than about a hundred pages; but there is hardly a line of them which has not its value; and the whole, when taken together, are to be placed at the head of Spanish lyric poetry. They are chiefly religious, and the source of their inspiration is not to be mistaken. Luis de Leon had a Hebrew soul, and kindles his enthusiasm almost always from the Jewish Scriptures. Still he preserved his nationality unimpaired. Nearly all the best of his poetical compositions are odes written in the old Castilian measures, with a classical purity and rigorous finish before unknown in Spanish poetry, and hardly attained since.[76]