From this period, the rich old prose style of Luis de Leon and his contemporaries may be said to have been driven out of Spanish literature. Lope de Vega and Quevedo, after resisting the innovations of _cultismo_ for a time, had long before yielded, and Calderon was now alternately assailing the depraved taste of his audiences and gratifying it by running into extravagances almost as great as those he ridiculed. The language of the most affected poetry passed into the prose of the age, and took from it the power and dignity which, even in its more declamatory portions, had constituted its prominent merit. Style became fantastic, and the very thoughts that were to be conveyed were not unfrequently covered up with ingenuities of illustration till they disappeared. In the phrase of Sancho, men wanted better bread than could be made of wheat, and rendered themselves ridiculous by attempting to obtain it. Tropes and figures of all kinds were settled into formulas of speech, and then were repeated appropriately and inappropriately, till the reader could often anticipate, from the beginning of a sentence, how it would inevitably end. Every thing, indeed, in prose composition, as in poetry, announced that corrupted taste which both precedes and hastens the decay of a literature; and which, in the case of Spain during the latter half of the seventeenth century, was but the concomitant of a general decline in the arts and the gradual degradation of the monarchy. Among those who wrote best, though still infected with the prevailing influences, was Zabaleta. His “Moral Problems” and “Famous Errors,” but especially his “Feast Days at Madrid,” in which he gives lively satirical sketches of the manners of the metropolis at those periods when idleness brings the people into the streets and places of amusement, are worth reading. But he lived in the reign of Philip the Fourth; and so did Lozano, whose different ascetic works on the character of King David, if not so good as his historical romance on the New Kings of Toledo, are better than any thing else of the kind in the same period. They are, however, the last that can be read. The reign of Charles the Second does not offer examples even so favorable as these of the remains and ruins of a better taste. “The Labors of Hercules,” by Heredia, in 1682, and the “Moral Essays on Boëthius,” by Ramirez, in 1698, if they serve for nothing else, serve at least to mark the ultimate limits of dulness and affectation. Indeed, if it were not for the History of Solís, which has been already noticed, we should look in vain for an instance of respectable prose composition after this last and most degenerate descendant of the House of Austria had mounted the Spanish throne.[261]