The poet who has obtained most popularity in our days is Melendez, a lawyer, who, having for some time been a professor of polite literature at Salamanca, was raised by the Prince of the Peace to a place in the Council of Castile, and, not long after, rusticated to his former residence, where he remains to this day. Melendez is a man of great natural talents, improved by more reading and information than is commonly found among our men of taste. His popularity as a poet, however, was at first raised on the very slight and doubtful foundation of a collection of Anacreontics, and a few love-poems, possessing little more merit than an harmonious language, and a certain elegant simplicity. Melendez, in his youth, was deeply infected with the mawkish sensibility of the school of Gessner; and had he not by degrees aimed at nobler subjects than his _Dove_, and his _Phyllis_, a slender progress in the national taste of Spain would have been sufficient to consign his early poems to the toilettes of our town shepherdesses. He has, however, in his maturer age, added a collection of odes to his pastorals, where he shows himself a great master of Spanish verse, though still deficient in boldness and originality. That he ranks little above the degree of a sweet versifier, is more to be attributed to that want of freedom which clips the wings of thought in every Spaniard, than to the absence of real genius. It is reported that Melendez is employed in a translation of Virgil: should he live to complete it, I have no doubt it will do honour to our country. During the attempt to awaken the Spanish Muse, which has been made for the last fifty years, none has struck out a fairer path towards her emancipation from the affected, stiff, and cumbrous style in which she was dressed by our Petrarchists of the sixteenth century than a naval officer named Arriaza. If his admirable command of language, and liveliness of fancy, were supported by any depth of thought, acquired knowledge, or the least degree of real feeling; the Spaniards would have an original poet to boast of. Few as the names of note are in the poetical department, I fear I must be completely silent in regard to the branch of eloquence. Years pass with us without the publication of any original work. A few translations from the French, with now and then a sermon, is all the Madrid Gazette can muster to fill up its page of advertisements. A compilation, entitled El Viagero Universal, and the translation of Guthrie’s Grammar of Geography, are looked upon as efforts both of literary industry and commercial enterprise.