It would be trivial to insist on the _Egemplar Poético_ if the author had been an insignificant man, or if the bulk of Spanish classic poetry showed that he spoke only for himself. But Juan de la Cueva has an honourable place in the history of Spanish dramatic literature among the forerunners of Lope de Vega. When he comes to write upon the comedy he rises at once above the level of mechanism and commonplace. He ceases to be a mere schoolboy to the Italians, and roundly vindicates the right of his countrymen to reject the Senecan model, to be alive, Spanish, and original on the stage, in defiance of all the rules and all the doctors. The theatre was to imitate nature, and to please. Poetry was to imitate the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute critic. That is the sum and substance of Juan de la Cueva’s teaching, and therein lies the explanation of the impassable gulf which separates the Spanish drama--a very genuine thing of its kind--from Spanish classic poetry--a school exercise, redeemed from time to time by a note of patriotism or of piety. [SN: _Artificiality of the work of the school._] When poetry is approached in this spirit its matter is likely to be as merely imitative as its form. Spanish classic poetry did not escape this fate, and there is only too much truth in the taunt of “sterile abundance” which has been thrown at it. We meet continually with the exasperating, nameless, characterless shadow of a lady whose “threads of gold” (which the rude vulgar call her hair) cruel hard tyrant Love has used to enchain the lamenting poet, whose sorrows just fill the correct number of stanzas. The pastoral raged. The same Tirsis and the same Chloe repeat many hundreds of times identical things in a landscape which has flowers but no flower, trees but no tree, and is withal most manifestly sham in arid, rocky Spain. Spanish critics have complained that their classic poets so seldom touched on the life of their time,--but that is a small matter. They have--piety and patriotism apart--little human reality of any kind. Love according to an Italian literary pattern, varied by platonism learnt from the Florentines, is the staple subject. Don Marcelino Menendez, the most learned of contemporary Spanish critics, has said, when controverting Ticknor’s theory that the Inquisition was accountable for the prevalence of Góngorism, that the real explanation of that disaster lies elsewhere. Europe, he says, was invaded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by a sham middle age and a sham antiquity, which could end in nothing but verbal follies. One does not recognise the truth of this judgment in the case of France and England, but it has force as applied to Spain.