Another instance of Zorrilla’s high-mindedness and true Castilian pride has been recorded. On his father’s property having been sequestrated by the government, it was intimated to him that if he applied he might have the administration of it, which was tantamount to giving him possession of it. But he replied that he would neither apply for it nor accept it, for while his father lived, he could acknowledge no one else as entitled to it. His father having since died, Zorrilla has come by law into possession of his estates, and has thus had the rare fortune, for a poet, to be possessed of considerable wealth. He has had several offers of appointments from the government, but he has declined them, contented to live according to his own fancies and occupied with his own peculiar pursuits. His extraordinary facility for composing verses is such as scarcely to allow his compositions to be termed studies; but with them and his attendances at the theatre, and other recreations, or at literary reunions, he is said to pass away his hours in ease and contentment. The first volume of his poems, it has been already intimated, was published before he was twenty-one years of age. Within three years afterwards seven others were published; and in the eighth, to the poem of ‘The Duke and the Sculptor,’ was appended the following note to his wife:--“Dedicated to the Señora Matilda O’Reilly de Zorrilla. I began the publication of my poems with our acquaintance, and I conclude them with thy name. Madrid, 10 October, 1840.” What were the circumstances attending this acquaintance or union, we are not informed; but it is fortunate for the world that the intimation it might convey of its being the conclusion of his literary works has not been fulfilled. Since then he has published ‘Songs of the Troubadour,’ in three volumes, and other minor poems and plays separately. A larger work he meditated on the conquest of Granada, to be entitled ‘The Cross and the Crescent,’ has not been completed; and another he projected with the title ‘Maria,’ intending to celebrate the different characters under which the Holy Virgin is venerated in Roman Catholic countries, he has published, with the greater part supplied by a friend, all very inferior to what might have been expected from him.