[4] Rimas, 1634, pp. 56, 234, 254. It is singular, however, that, while Bartolomé imitates Horace, he expresses his preference for Juvenal. Pero quando á escribir sátiras llegues, A ningun irritado cartapacio, Sino al del cauto Juvenal, te entregues. He seems, too, to have been accounted an imitator of Juvenal by his contemporaries; for Guevara, in his “Diablo Cojuelo,” Tranco IX., calls him “Divino Juvenal Aragones.” But it is impossible not to see that he is full of Horatian turns of thought. Quevedo, on the other hand, followed Juvenal, whose hard, unsparing temper was better suited to his own tastes, and to a disposition embittered by cruel persecutions. But Quevedo is often free and indecorous, as well as harsh, and offends that sensibility to virtue which a satirist ought carefully to cultivate. It should, however, be remembered in his favor, that, though living under the despotism of the Philips, and crushed by it, no Spanish poet stands before him in the spirit of an independent and vigorous satire. Góngora approaches him on some occasions, but Góngora rarely dealt with grave subjects, and confined his satire almost entirely to burlesque ballads and sonnets, which he wrote in the fervor of his youth. At no period of his life, and certainly not after he went to court, would he have hazarded a satirical epistle like the one on the decay of Castilian spirit and the corruption of Castilian manners, which Quevedo had the courage to send to the Count Duke Olivares, when he was at the height of his influence.[5] [5] It is the last poem in the “Melpomene.” The greatest contemporaries of both of them hardly turned their thoughts in this direction; for as to Cervantes, his “Journey to Parnassus” is quite too good-natured an imitation of Caporali to be classed among satires, even if its form permitted it to be placed there; and as to Lope de Vega, though some of his sonnets and other shorter poems are full of spirit and severity, especially those that pass under the name of Burguillos, still his whole course, and the popular favor that followed it, naturally prevented him from seeking occasions to do or say any thing ungracious.