The attempt was by no means a new one. The rules and doctrines of the ancients, in matters of taste and rhetoric, had frequently before been announced and defended in Spain. Even Enzina, the oldest of those who regarded Castilian poetry as an art, was not ignorant of Quintilian and Cicero, though, in his short treatise, which shows more good sense and good taste than can be claimed from the age, he takes substantially the same view of his subject that the Marquis of Villena and the Provençals had taken before him,--considering all poetry chiefly with reference to its mechanical forms.[297] Rengifo, a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, whose “Spanish Art of Poetry” dates from 1592, confines himself almost entirely to the structure of the verse and the technical forms known both to the elder Castilian style of composition and to the Italian introduced by Boscan;--a curious discussion, in which the authority of the ancients is by no means forgotten, but one whose chief value consists in what it contains relating to the national school and its peculiar measures.[298] [297] It is prefixed to the edition of Enzina’s Cancionero, 1496, folio, and, I suppose, to the other editions; and fills nine short chapters. [298] “Arte Poética Española, su Autor Juan Diaz Rengifo,” Salamanca, 1592, 4to, enlarged, but not improved, in the editions of 1700, 1737, etc., by Joseph Vicens. Alonso Lopez, commonly called El Pinciano,--the same person who wrote the dull epic on Pelayo,--went further, and in 1596 published his “Ancient Poetical Philosophy,” in which, under the disguise of a friendly correspondence, he gives, with much learning and some acuteness, his own views of the opinions of the ancient masters on all the modes of poetical composition.[299] Cascales followed him, in 1616, with a series of dialogues, somewhat more familiar than the grave letters of Lopez, and resting more on the doctrines of Horace, whose epistle to the Pisos he afterwards published, with a well-written Latin commentary.[300] Salas, on the contrary, in his “New Idea of Ancient Tragedy,” which appeared in 1633, followed Aristotle rather than any other authority, and illustrated his discussion--which is the ablest in Spanish literature on the side it sustains--by a translation of the “Trojanæ” of Seneca, and an address of the theatre of all ages to its various audiences.[301] [299] “Philosophía Antigua Poética del Doctor Alonso Lopez Pinciano, Médico Cesareo,” Madrid, 1596, 4to. [300] “Tablas Poéticas del Licenciado Francisco Cascales,” 1616. An edition of Madrid, 1779, 8vo, contains a Life of the author by Mayans y Siscar. Cascales is presumptuous enough to rearrange Horace’s “Ars Poetica” in what he regards as a better order. [301] “Nueva Idea de la Tragedia Antigua, ó Illustracion Ultima al libro Singular de Poética de Aristóteles, por Don Jusepe Ant. Gonçalez de Salas,” Madrid, 1633, 4to.