The next year Melendez came to Madrid. He was received with great kindness by Jovellanos and his friends; and obtained new honors at the Academy of San Fernando, by an ode “On the Glory of the Arts,” which that Academy had been founded to foster. But his preference was still for his old poetical haunts on the banks of the Tórmes, and, having obtained the chair of Professor of the Humanities or Philology, at Salamanca, he gladly returned thither, and devoted himself to its unostentatious duties. In 1784, at the suggestion of Jovellanos, he became a competitor for the prize offered by the city of Madrid for a comedy, and wrote “The Marriage of Camacho.” But his talent was not dramatic; and therefore, though he obtained the votes of the judges, he did not, to the great disappointment of his patron, obtain those of the public when his drama was brought to the test of a free representation. This failure, however, he retrieved a year afterwards, by publishing a small volume of poetry, chiefly lyric and pastoral. Most of it is in the short, national verse, and nearly all is marked with a great gentleness of spirit and a truly poetical sensibility. The Anacreontics which it contains remind us of Villegas, but have more philosophy and more tenderness than his. The ballads, for which his talent was no less happily fitted, if they lack the abrupt vigor of the elder times, have a grace, a lightness, and a finish which belong to that more advanced period of a nation’s poetry, when the popular lyre has ceased to give forth new and original tones. But everywhere this little volume shows traces of an active fancy and powers of nice observation, which break forth in rich and faithful descriptions of natural scenery, and in glimpses of what is tenderest and truest in the human heart. It was, in fact, a volume of poetry more worthy of the country than any that had been produced in Spain since the disappearance of the great lights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and it was received, in consequence, with general enthusiasm, not only for its own sake, but as the long-looked-for dawn of a brighter day.