[28] What remains of Céspedes’s poetry is to be found in the eighteenth volume of Fernandez’s collection. His life is well set forth in the excellent “Diccionario de los Profesores de las Bellas Artes, por A. Cean Bermudez,” Madrid, 1800, 6 tom. 12mo, Tom. I. p. 316; besides which, its learned author, at the end of Tom. V., has republished the fragments of the poem on Painting in a better order than that in which they had before appeared; adding a pleasant prose discourse, in a pure style, on Ancient and Modern Painting and Sculpture, which Céspedes wrote in 1604, when recovering from a fever, and two other of his trifles; to the whole of which is prefixed a judicious Preface by Cean himself. Céspedes had been a Greek scholar in his youth, and says, that, in his old age, when he chanced to open Pindar, he “never failed to find a well-drawn and rich picture, grand and fit for Michel Angelo to paint.” He was a friend of Carranza, the great archbishop, who, after being a leading member of the Council of Trent, and confessor of Mary of England after she married Philip II., was worried to death by the Inquisition in 1576. (See, _ante_, Vol. I. p. 466.) Céspedes himself came near suffering from a similar persecution, in consequence of a letter he wrote to Carranza in 1559, in which he spoke disrespectfully of the Grand Inquisitor and the Holy Office. Llorente, Hist., Tom. II. p. 440. But the poems of Cueva and Céspedes were not printed till long after the death of their authors; and none of their contemporaries was inspired by like influences. The best that was done in didactic poetry, at about the same time, was the slight, but pleasant, sort of defence of his own irregularities produced by Lope de Vega, under the name of “The New Art of Writing Plays”; and the best, written later in the century, were the “Selvas,” as he called them, or poems in irregular verse, by Count Rebolledo, on the Arts of War and Civil Government, which date from 1652, but which are little more than rhymed prose. A long poem in ten cantos, and in the old _quintilla_ verse, by Trapeza, published in 1612, and entitled “The Cross,” because it is a sort of exposition of all the theological virtues attributed to that holy emblem, is too dull to be noticed, even if it were more strictly didactic in its form.[29] [29] Lope’s “Arte Nuevo” has been already noticed. The “Selva Militar y Política” of Rebolledo was first printed at Cologne, in 1652, 18mo, its author being then Spanish minister in Denmark, of whose kings he has given a sort of genealogical history in another poem, his “Selvas Dánicas.”--“La Cruz, por Albanio Ramirez de la Trapeza,” Madrid, 1612, 12mo, pp. 368, to which are added a few pages of short poems on the Cross.