Meanwhile the press was not so inactive as it had been. Sedano published his “Jael,” taken from the story in the book of Judges; Lassala his “Iphigenia”; Trigueros his “Tradesmen of Madrid”; and Cortés his “Atahualpa”; the last two having been written, and successful, at the same festivities of 1784 for which Melendez composed his “Marriage of Camacho,” and failed. Cienfuegos, too, a poet of more original power than either of them, wrote his “Pitaco,” which opened for him the doors of the Spanish Academy; his “Idomeneo,” from which, in imitation of Alfieri, he excluded the passion of love; and his “Countess of Castile,” and his “Zoraida,” taken from the old traditions of his country’s wars and feuds; each giving proof of talent, but of talent rather lyric than dramatic, and each showing too anxious an adherence to Greek models, which were particularly unsuitable for the Zoraida, whose scene is laid in the gardens of the Alhambra.[381] But all of them--so far at least as the public stage is concerned--have been long since forgotten. [381] Obras de Cienfuegos, Madrid, 1798, 2 tom. 12mo;--the only edition published by himself. On the other hand, La Huerta, in 1785, published fourteen volumes of the old full-length plays, and one volume of the old “Entremeses”; a work intended to vindicate the national theatre of Spain in the preceding century, and to place it as high as that of the rest of Europe, or higher. But he was ill fitted for his task. A selection, designed to illustrate the great masters of the Spanish stage, which, to say nothing of other mistakes, wholly omitted Lope de Vega, began with a capital defect; and this circumstance, together with the arrogant tone of the editor in his Prefaces, and the contradiction to his present opinions afforded by the example of his own “Raquel,” which is entirely in the French manner, and to his translations of the “Electra” of Sophocles and the “Zaïre” of Voltaire, which were obviously made to defend the French school, prevented his “Teatro Hespañol” from producing the effect that might otherwise have followed its not ill-timed appearance. Still it was a work of consequence, and was afterwards acknowledged to be such by the public.[382] [382] Vicente Garcia de la Huerta was born in 1734, and died in 1787. A notice of his life, which was not without literary and social success,--though much disturbed by a period of exile and disgrace,--is to be found in the Semanario Pintoresco, (1842, p. 305,) and some intimation of the various literary quarrels in which he was engaged with his contemporaries may be seen in the next note. His general character is not ill summed up in the following epitaph on him, said to have been written by Yriarte, one of his opponents, which should be read, recollecting that Saragossa was famous for a hospital for the insane,--the mad-house that figures so largely in Avellaneda’s “Don Quixote.”