Oña shared the religious views of the bulk of his countrymen; in fact, the only persons who showed a disposition to break with the Church were the encomenderos, when they found the priests intervening to modify their treatment of the Indians. But Oña’s devoutness was only such as conformed to the current sentiments of the more or less cultivated colonists. It was a phase of Spanish patriotism and presumed hostility to the English heretics. It presumed also that those who fell in conflict with the English, whatever may have been the real origin of the combat, fell in a holy cause. Another item in the mental furniture of Oña and those like him was “the dogma of royal majesty,” which involved attachment and devotion to the king of Spain, and ascribed to him all the virtues, and especially love for his subjects, in spite of his mental and moral incapacity and his subjection to corrupt favourites. It involved devotion, service, and sacrifice to an ideal that became farther and farther removed from the reality as one Spanish monarch succeeded another throughout the last half of the sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth century. Proceeding from an author in this attitude of mind, the poem naturally became a very serious production, not defiled by any breath of humour. [Sidenote: _Río Lima al río Tibre_] A later work of Pedro de Oña which has come to light appeared in connexion with the celebration of the designation of the Blessed Francisco Solano as patron of the city of Santiago. It is entitled _Río Lima al río Tibre_. This poem was printed in the beginning of Alonso Mendieta’s edition of Diego de Córdoba’s _Vida, virtudes y milagros del Apóstol del Perú, el V. P. Fray Francisco Solano_, which was published in Madrid in 1643. It is based on the account of Francisco Solano set forth in Córdoba’s _Vida_, and other material drawn from the early history of the western coast of South America. Medina indicated his appreciation of it by printing it in the text of his _Historia de la literatura colonial de Chile_, and designating it as the most interesting of the author’s poems. And the poet himself he characterized as “without doubt the greatest Chilean poet of the colonial period.” At the end of his elaborate account he pronounces a general judgment of the man and his work: “As a man, the remembrance of his kindness, his simple and honourable character, his love of his country and family cannot but awaken profound sympathy; and as a poet the verses of _Arauco domado_ are destined to be remembered under their double aspect of history and of literature.”[73] [Sidenote: _El Ignacio de Cantabra_] [Sidenote: Quality of _El Ignacio_]