By all accounts, this multiplex being could write as easily; he was poet and dramatist as well as sculptor and painter. At school he continued to practise the art his mother had taught him, showing himself a skilled practitioner in verse and a devout worshiper of poetry, Spanish and Tagalog. For, despite the common European belief to the contrary, Tagalog is not the dialect of a tribe of savages but a highly developed language having an ancient and honorable literature. There were poems in Tagalog as early as in English, and many a beautiful Tagalog poem has been sung and resung and passed into the heritage of the people where no European speech had ever been heard. At the age when children usually begin to learn their alphabet this boy was making verses. A little later he could see subjects not only for poems but for plays. Before he was eight years old he had written a drama that was performed at a local festival and brought him two pesos. At the Ateneo, poetry and dramatic composition were his relaxation, his pastime, his joy and rapture, when he turned from the ponderous routine of the curriculum. In December, 1875, he being then fifteen, he wrote “The Embarkation, a Hymn in Honor of Magellan’s Fleet,” a poem in seven stanzas of eight lines. The measure may be called anapestic dimeter, of which old Skelton was a master and in which Herrick occasionally performed, but rare thereafter in English poetry until Hood and Swinburne revived it. A few months later he appeared with a poem of nine stanzas arranged much after the manner of the Sicilian octave. This was on “Education” and contained exquisite imagery, while it showed an unmistakable grasp of melodic resource. [44]