[8] A striking instance of this is to be found in the “Primera Parle del Parnaso Antártico,” by Diego Mexia, printed at Seville, 1608, 4to, and the only portion of it ever printed. It consists of an original poetical letter by a lady to Mexia, and a translation of twenty-one of the Epistles of Ovid and his “Ibis”; all in _terza rima_, and nearly all in pure and beautiful Castilian verse. In the edition in the collection of Fernandez, Tom. XIX., 1799, the epistle by the lady is omitted, which is a pity, since it contains notices of several South American poets. Rioja, on the contrary, seems to have been of the true temperament, and to have written elegies from instinct, though he called them _Silvas_; while Quevedo, if he were the author of the poems that pass under the name of the Bachiller de la Torre, must have done violence to his genius in the composition of ten short pieces, which he calls _Endechas_, in Adonian verse, but which read much like imitations of some of the gentler among the old ballads. If to these we add the thirteen elegies of Villegas, nearly all of which are epistles, and one or two of them light and amusing epistles, we shall have what is most worthy of notice in this small division of Spanish poetry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that has not been already considered. From the whole, we should naturally infer that the Spanish temperament was little fitted to the subdued, simple, and gentle tone of the proper elegy; a conclusion that is undoubtedly true, notwithstanding the examples of Garcilasso and Rioja, the best and most elegiac portions of whose poetry do not even bear its name.[9] [9] The best elegiac poetry in the Spanish language is, perhaps, that in the two divisions of the first eclogue of Garcilasso. Elegies, or mournful poems of any kind, are often called _Endechas_ in Spanish, as Quevedo called his sad amatory poems; but the origin of the word is not settled, nor its meaning quite well defined. Venegas, in a vocabulary of obscure words at the end of his “Agonía del Tránsito de la Muerte,” 1574, p. 370, says he thinks it comes from _inde jaces_, as if the mourner addressed the dead body. But this is absurd. It may come from the Greek ἕνδεκα, for when the last verse of each stanza contained just eleven syllables, the poem was said to be written in _endechas reales_. See Covarrubias, and the Academy, _ad verbum_, who give no opinion. * * * * *