Yriarte, better known as a didactic poet and fabulist, enjoys the distinction of having produced the first regular original _comedy_ that was publicly represented in Spain. He began very young, with a play which he did not afterwards think fit to place among his collected works; and, beside translations from Voltaire and Destouches, and three or four attempts of less consequence, he wrote two full-length original comedies, which were better than any thing previously produced by the school to which he belonged. One of them, called “The Flattered Youth,” appeared in 1778, and the other, “The Ill-bred Miss,” ten years later;--the first being on the subject of a son spoiled by a foolishly indulgent mother, and the second on the daughter of a rich man equally spoiled by the carelessness and neglect of her father. Both are divided into three acts, and written in the imperfect rhyme and short verses always grateful to Castilian ears; and both are marked by good character-drawing and a pleasant, easy manner, not abounding in wit nor sensibly deficient in it. But, except these plays of Yriarte and Moratin, and an unfortunate one by Melendez Valdes in 1784,--founded on Camacho’s wedding, in “Don Quixote,” and containing occasionally gentle and pleasing pastoral poetry which ill agrees with the rude jesting of Sancho,--nothing that deserves notice was done for comedy in the latter part of the reign of Charles the Third.[374] [374] The “Obras de Yriarte” (Madrid, 1805, 8 tom. 12mo) contain all his plays, except the first one, written when he was only eighteen years old, and called “Hacer que Hacemos,” or Much Cry and Little Wool. The play of Melendez Valdes is in the second volume of his Works, 1797. Tragedy fared still worse. The “Numantia Destroyed,” written by Ayala, a man of learning and the regular censor of the public theatres of Madrid, was acted in 1775. Its subject is the same with that of the “Numantia” by Cervantes; but the horrors of the siege it describes are not brought home to the sympathies of the reader by instances of individual suffering, as they are in the elder dramatist, and therefore produce much less effect. As an acting drama, however, it is not without merit. Its versification, which is, again, an attempt at a compromise with the public by giving alternate _asonantes_, but attaching them to the long-drawn lines of the French theatre, is not, indeed, fortunate; but the style is otherwise rich and vigorous, and the tone elevated. Perhaps its ardent expressions of patriotic feeling, and its fierce denunciations of foreign oppression, have done as much to keep it on the stage as its intrinsic poetical merits.