In 1771 his uncle died, and Tomas Iriarte, who had already been acting for him in one of his offices as Interpreter to the Government, was appointed to succeed him in it. He was afterwards, in 1776, appointed Keeper of the Archives of the Council of War; and these offices, with the charge of a paper under the influence of the government, seem to have been the only public employments he held. From one of his epistles, however, he appears to have succeeded to his uncle’s property, and thus to have had the means as also the leisure to give much of his time to the indulgence of literary tastes. He was very fond of paintings and of music, to which he showed his predilection, not only by his ability to play on several instruments, but also by writing a long didactic poem on the art, entitled ‘Musica.’ This he seems to have considered as giving him his principal claim to be ranked as a poet, though the world preferred his other writings. When yet under twenty years of age, Iriarte had already appeared as a writer of plays, some of which met with considerable approbation. Of these it will be sufficient for us here to observe, that Moratin, the first great dramatic poet of Spain in modern times, pronounced one of them, ‘The Young Gentleman Pacified,’ to have been “the first original comedy the Spanish theatre had seen written according to the most essential rules dictated by philosophy and good criticism.” Besides several original plays, Iriarte translated others from the French, from which language he also translated the ‘New Robinson’ of Campe, which passed through several editions. From Virgil he translated into Spanish verse the first four books of the Æneid, and from Horace the Epistle to the Pisos. These, though censured by some of his contemporaries so as to excite his anger, were altogether too superior to those attacks to have required the vindication of them he thought proper to publish. Horace seems to have been his favourite author; but he had not learned from him his philosophical equanimity, wherewith to pass over in silent endurance the minor miseries of life. Thus he allowed himself, throughout his short career, to be too much affected by those ungenerous attacks, which mediocrity is so apt to make on superior merit. The names of those censurers are now principally remembered by his notices of their writings; an honour, which men of genius, in their hours of irritation, too often confer on unworthy opponents. Thus a large portion of his collected works consists of these controversial notices, which, as usual in such cases, only impair the favourable effect produced by the remainder on the mind of the reader. Those works were first published in a collected form in six volumes, in 1786; afterwards in eight volumes, in 1805.