Still, serious romance was written in Spain during the whole of the seventeenth century, and written in several varieties of form and tone, though with no real success. Thus, Gonzalo de Céspedes, a native of Madrid, and author of several other works, published the first part of his “Gerardo” in 1615, and the second in 1617. He calls it a Tragic Poem, and divides it into discourses instead of chapters. But it is, in fact, a prose romance, consisting of a series of slightly connected adventures in the life of its hero, Gerardo, and episodes of the adventures of different persons more or less associated with him; in all which, amidst much that is sentimental and romantic, there is more that is tragic than is common in such Spanish stories. It was several times reprinted, and was succeeded, in 1626, by his “Various Fortunes of the Soldier Píndaro,” a similar work, but less interesting, and perhaps, on that account, never finished according to the original purpose of its author. Both, however, show a power of invention which is hardly to be found in works of the same class produced so early, either in France or England, and both make pretensions to style, though rather in their lighter than in their more serious portions.[130] [130] “Poema Trágico del Español Gerardo y Desengaño del Amor Lascivo” is the title of the story; and, besides the first edition, it was printed in 1617, 1618, 1623, 1625, 1654, etc. The “Varia Fortuna del Soldado Píndaro,” who, notwithstanding his classical name, is represented as a native of Castile, was less favored. I know only the editions of 1626 and 1661, till we come to that of Madrid, 1845, 8vo, illustrated with much spirit. Of Céspedes y Meneses a slight notice is to be found in Baena, Hijos de Madrid, Tom. II. p. 362. Again in 1617,--the same year, it will be recollected, in which the “Persiles and Sigismunda” of Cervantes appeared,--Francisco Loubayssin de Lamarca, a Biscayan by birth, published his “Tragicomic History of Don Enrique de Castro”; in which known facts and fanciful adventures are mingled in the wildest confusion. The scene is carried back, by means of the story of the hero’s uncle, who has become a hermit in his old age, to the Italian wars of Charles the Eighth of France, and forward, in the person of the hero himself, to the conquest of Chili by the Spaniards; covering meanwhile any intermediate space that seems convenient to its author’s purposes. As an historical novel, it is an entire failure.[131] [131] The “Historia Tragicómica de Don Enrique de Castro” was printed at Paris, in 1617, when its author was twenty-nine years old. Two years earlier he had published “Engaños deste Siglo.” (Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. II. p. 358.) I believe he sometimes wrote in French.