manuscript,” and yet the story of Doña Cintia de la Carrera, in the fifty-fourth and fifty-fifth chapters, is taken from Moreto’s “Desden con el Desden”; a play as well known as any in Spanish literature. The chief talent of Father Isla was in satire, and the great service he performed for his country was that of driving from its respectable churches the low and vulgar style of preaching with which they had long been infested;--a work which the “Friar Gerund” achieved almost as completely as the “Don Quixote” did that of destroying the insane passion for books of chivalry which prevailed in the seventeenth century. But, meanwhile, other attempts were making in other directions to revive the literature of the country; some by restoring a taste for the old national poetry, some by attempting to accommodate every thing to the French doctrines of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, and some by an ill-defined and often, perhaps, unconscious struggle to unite the two opinions, and to form a school whose character should be unlike that of either and yet in advance of both. In the direction of the earlier national poetry little was done by original efforts, but something was attempted in other ways. Huerta, a fierce, but inconsistent, adversary of the French innovations, printed, in 1778, a volume of poems almost entirely in the old manner; but it was too much marked with the bad taste of the preceding century to enjoy even a temporary success, and its author, therefore, could boast of no follower of any note in a path which was constantly less and less trodden.[339] [339] “Poesías de Don Vicente Garcia de la Huerta,” Madrid, 1778, 12mo, and a second edition, 1786. “La Perromachia,” a mock-heroic on the loves and quarrels of sundry dogs, by Francisco Nieto Molina, (Madrid, 1765, 12mo,) is too poor to deserve notice, though it is an attempt to give greater currency to the earlier national verse,--the _redondillas_.