Yet Juan de la Cueba or Cueva (the _b_ and _v_, being very similar in Spanish pronunciation, were constantly written for one another before the spelling was fixed) was a man not unworthy of attention. His life is covered by the obscurity common to the men of letters of the time, and on the whole more dense in Spain than elsewhere. But we know that he lived in Seville during the latter half of the sixteenth century. His _Egemplar Poético_, though not considered as above reproach in form by Spanish critics, undoubtedly contains the orthodox poetic creed of the school, and is therefore of authority. Nothing is more striking or, when the future of poetry in the two countries is considered, more significant, than the contrast between the three verse epistles of Don Juan de la Cueva, and the _Apologie for Poetrie_ of Sir Philip Sidney. The _Egemplar_ is in tercets, and the _Apologie_ in fresh youthful prose; but the work of the Englishman is all on fire with the very soul of poetic feeling, while the work of the Spaniard is a cold didactic treatise of the most mechanical kind. Sir Philip committed himself to the heresy that the essential of poetry is in the matter, the passion, and the intention, while the verse is an accident. Don Juan is spotlessly correct on the one point on which Sir Philip is heterodox. On the many on which our countryman goes to the root of the matter, the Sevillian is worse than wrong. He drops no single word to show that he thinks them worthy of consideration. A few general platitudes are to be found inculcating the wisdom of consulting your genius, the excellence of consistency and decency, the duty of despising the _profanum vulgus_, the folly of applying the metres and language proper to kings and great persons to the doings of common people. Then having cleared the way, he proceeds to the things really of necessity for a poet,--as that no _cancion_ should contain more than fifteen stanzas; that a _sestina_ is rhymed _a b c_, _c b a_, and that its lines ought to end in nouns and never in verbs; that three adjectives are more than enough for any substantive; that an _agudo_ at the end of a hendecasyllable is the abomination of desolation; that the letter _l_ is useful for sweetness; that _r_ comes in with good effect “when violent Eurus opposes his rush with horrid fury to powerful Boreas”; and that _s_ suits with soft sleep and savoury repose (“al blando sueño y al sabroso sosiego”), for he did not scorn alliteration’s artful aid.