All these works, however, and three or four others of less consequence, assumed, so far as they attempted to lay their foundations in philosophy, to be built on the rules laid down by Aristotle or the Roman rhetoricians.[302] In this they committed a serious error. Ancient rhetoric can be applied, in all its strictness, to no modern poetry, and least of all to the poetry of Spain. The school of Lope de Vega, therefore, passed over them like an irresistible flood, leaving behind it hardly a trace of the structures that had been raised to oppose its progress. But Luzan took a different ground. His more immediate predecessors had been Gracian, who defended the Gongorism of the preceding period, and Artiga, who, in a long treatise “On Spanish Eloquence,” written in the ballad measures, had seemed willing to encourage all the bad taste that prevailed in the beginning of the eighteenth century.[303] [302] Of the treatise of Argote de Molina, prefixed to his edition of the “Conde Lucanor,” 1575, and of the poem of Cueva, I have spoken (I. 507, II. 569). A small tract, called “Libro de Erudicion Poética,” published in the works of Luis Carrillo, 1611, and several of the epistles of Christóval de Mesa, 1618, might be added; but the last are of little consequence, and the tract of Carrillo is in very bad taste. [303] Gracian has been noticed in this volume (p. 192). The “Epítome de la Eloquencia Española, por D. Francisco Joseph Artiga, olim Artieda,” was licensed in 1725, and contains above thirteen thousand lines;--a truly ridiculous book, but of some consequence as showing the taste of the age, especially in pulpit oratory.