Never did mariner desire To reach his destined port With happy fate; Ne’er did good warrior, in the fire Of battle, victory court, With hopes elate; Nor mother for her child’s dear life, Tossed on the stormy wave So earnest pray, As I for some safe cave To hide me from this restless strife In peace away. An edition of Castilla’s very rare volume may have been printed about 1536, when it was licensed; but I have never seen it, nor any notice of it. The one of which I have a copy was printed at Zaragoza, 4to, lit. got., 1552; and I believe there is one of Alcalá, either in 1554 or 1564, 8vo. The poetry of Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, who was Regidor of Madrid, and a member of the Cortes of 1544, is, perhaps, more rare than that of Castilla, and is contained in a small volume printed at Alcalá in 1550, and entitled “Buen Placer trovado en treze discantes de quarta rima Castellana segun imitacion de trobas Francesas,” etc. It consists of thirteen discourses on a happy life, its means and motives, all written in stanzas of four lines each, which their author calls _French_, I suppose, because they are longer lines than those in the old national measures, and rhymed alternately,--the rhymes of one stanza running into the next. At the end is a _Canto Real_, as it is called, on a verse in the Psalms, composed in the same manner; and several smaller poems, one of which is a kind of religious _villancico_, and four of them sonnets. The tone of the whole is didactic, and its poetical value small. I cite eight lines, as a specimen of its peculiar manner and rhymes:-- Errado va quien busca ser contento En mal plazer mortal, que como heno Se seca y passa como humo en viento, De vanos tragos de ayre muy relleno. Quando las negras velas van en lleno Del mal plazer, villano peligroso, De buen principio y de buen fin ageno, No halla en esta vida su reposo. Mendoza was a person of much consideration in his time, and is noticed as such by Quintana, (Historia de Madrid, Madrid, 1629, folio,) who gives one of his sonnets at f. 27, and a sketch of his character at f. 245. In the age of Philip the Second, the didactic, like most of the other branches of Spanish poetry, spreads out more broadly. Francisco de Guzman’s “Opinions of Wise Men,” and especially his dull allegory of “Moral Triumphs,” in imitation of Petrarch, are, for their length, the most important of the different didactic poems which that period produced.[25] But more characteristic than either is the deeply religious letter of Francisco de Aldana to Montano, in 1573; and much more beautiful and touching than either is one written at about the same time by Juan Rufo to his infant son, filled with gentle affection and wise counsels.