[287] For an account of these Academies, see Guarinos, “Biblioteca”; and for a notice of the origin of the Royal Academy of History, see the first volume of its Memoirs. The old _Academias_, in imitation of the Italian,--such as are ridiculed in the “Diablo Cojuelo,” Tranco IX.,--had much gone out of fashion and been displaced by the modern _Tertulias_, where both sexes meet, and which in their turn have been ridiculed in the _Saynetes_ of Ramon de la Cruz and Castillo. But such associations everywhere, though they may be useful and even important in their proper relations, can neither create a new literature for a country, nor, where the old literature is seriously decayed, do much to revive it. The Spanish academies were no exceptions to this remark. All elegant culture had so nearly disappeared before the accession of the Bourbons, and there was such an insensibility to its value in those classes of society where it should have been most cherished, that it was plain the resuscitation must be the work of time, and that the land must long lie fallow before another harvest could be gathered in. During the entire reign of Philip the Fifth, therefore,--a reign which, including the few months of his nominal abdication in favor of his son, extends to forty-six years,--we shall find undeniable traces of this unhappy state of things; few authors appearing who deserve to be named at all, and still fewer who demand a careful notice. Poetry, indeed, or what passed under that name, continued to be written; and some of it, though little encouraged by the general regard of the nation, was printed. Moraes, a Portuguese gentleman of rank, who had lived in Spain from his youth, wrote two heroic poems in Spanish; the first on the discovery of “The New World,” which he published in 1701, and the other on the foundation of the kingdom of Portugal, which was printed in 1712; both appearing originally in an unfinished state, in consequence of the author’s impatience for fame, and the earlier of them still remaining so. But they have been long forgotten. Indeed, the first, which is full of extravagant allegories, soon found the fate which its author felt it deserved; and the other, though written with great deference for the rules of art, and more than once reprinted, has not at last enjoyed a better fortune.