[292] “Sagradas Flores del Parnaso, Consonancias Métricas de la bien Templada Lyra de Apolo, que á la reverente Católica Accion de haver ido accompañando sus Magestades el Ssmo Sacramento que iba á Darse por viatico á una Enferma el Dia 28 de Novembre, 1722, cantaron los mejores Cisnes de España,” 4to. I give the title of the first collection in full, as an indication of the bad taste of its contents. Both collections, taken together, make about 200 pages, and contain poems by about fifty authors, generally in the worst and most affected style,--the very dregs of Gongorism. A single bright spot in the poetical history of this period is only the more remarkable from the gloom that surrounds it. It is a satire attributed to Herbas, a person otherwise unknown, who disguised himself under the name of Jorge de Pitillas, and printed it in a literary journal. It was singularly successful for the time when it appeared; a circumstance the more to be noticed, as this success seems not to have inspired any similar attempt, or even to have encouraged the author to venture again before the public. The subject he chose was fortunate,--the bad writers of his age,--and in discussing it he has spoken out boldly and manfully; sometimes calling by name those whom he ridicules, and at other times indicating them so that they cannot be mistaken. His chief merits are the ease and simplicity of his style, the pungency and justness of his satire, and his agreeable imitations of the old masters, especially Persius and Juvenal, whom he further resembled in the commendable qualities of brevity and sententiousness.[293] [293] The “Sátira contra los Malos Escritores de su Tiempo” is commonly attributed to José Gerardo de Herbas; but Tapia (Civilisacion, Tom. IV. p. 266) says it was written by José Cobo de la Torre, besides which it is inserted in the “Rebusco de las Obras Literarias de J. F. de Isla,” (Madrid, 1790, 12mo,) as if it were unquestionably Isla’s. It first appeared in the second edition of the sixth volume of the “Diario de los Literatos”;--the earliest periodical work in the spirit of modern criticism that was published in Spain, and one so much in advance of the age that it did not survive its second year, having been begun in 1737, and gone on one year and nine months, till it made seven small volumes. It was in vain that it was countenanced by the king, and favored by the leading persons at court. It was too large a work; it was a new thing, which Spaniards rarely like; and it was severe in its criticisms, so that the authors of the time generally took the field against it, and broke it down. To the same period with the Satire of Pitillas belongs the poem on “Deucalion,” by Alonso Verdugo de Castilla, Count of Torrepalma. It is an imitation of Ovid, in about sixty octave stanzas, somewhat remarkable for its versification. But in a better period it would not be noticed. CHAPTER II.