As a patriotic poet Quintana has been compared to Beranger, and is said to have had the same power over the minds of his countrymen. If the parallel be correct, it may be curious to consider how characteristically these two poets appeal to the feelings of their admirers; one by songs and incidents, which though often trivial, yet speak to the heart in its most sensitive points, while the other proceeds to the same object by martial odes of commanding austerity. Besides the Ode to Balmis, the other one in this work, on the Battle of Trafalgar, has been chosen for translation, as most likely to interest the English reader, though it may not be in itself so much to be admired as some others of his poems. The reader will perhaps observe a constrained style in it, even beyond that of translation,--sentiments forced, as if the subject had not been taken voluntarily. It must not therefore be looked upon as a favourable specimen of Quintana’s genius, like the Ode to Balmis, which more fully shows the character of his mind. Quintana, more than other poets of his time, has written in one style of verse, as in imitation of the Pindaric ode, or of our Gray and Dryden. Thus with free metres and often unfettered by rhyme, he has a staid measured tone, well suited to the subjects he has generally adopted. They are considered in Spain as of an elegiac character; and as accordant with them, they have fallen in the translation into the form of our elegies, or the heroic lines with alternate rhymes, the style of verse which Dryden, a high authority on such a question, pronounced “the most magnificent of all the measures which our language affords.”