A general estimate of a school must always be difficult to justify except by a profusion of quotation, which is impossible here. We can do no more than leave it to be accepted or rejected by those who can control it by a knowledge of the original, and proceed to give such a sketch of the history of Spanish classic poetry as our limits allow.[9] It falls naturally under two heads--the Lyric and the Epic--and in both the presence of the Italian model is constant. The leading form in lyric poetry is the _cancion_ in hendecasyllables with _quebrados_--that is, broken lines of seven syllables. But the _Epístola_ in tercets, imitated from the _capitolo_ of the Italians, is very common. The song proper is wholly absent. There is no “Come unto these yellow sands,” no voice of Ariel in Spanish poetry. The Spaniard does not sing; he chants. [SN: _Boscan._] Of the two chiefs of the school, Boscan ranks mainly by virtue of the example he set. He was somewhat harshly condemned by his follower, Herrera, for hanging jewels robbed from the classics and Italians on his own robe of frieze. The charge of plagiarism is not easily rebutted, for Boscan certainly took his goods where he found them in Virgil or Horace. As for the quality of his robe, it is undoubtedly of the nature of frieze. What strikes the reader most in Boscan is a certain worldly good sense, more like our own Queen Anne men than the poetry of a sixteenth-century school at its beginning. His most quoted piece, an _Epístola_ addressed to Diego de Mendoza, is eminently rational prose disguised in verse, avowing a most heterodox affection for his wife (his whole tone to women is thoroughly modern), and a quite unpoetic liking for a good supper by a blazing fire of logs at the end of a day in the open air. But we note also the maturity of the language, in spite of a certain awkwardness due to the writer’s want of skill. [SN: _Garcilaso._] This same premature and fatal maturity is even more conspicuous in Garcilaso, who was more master of his pen. In the small body of his verse, and the one fragment which remains of his prose--a letter to his friend’s wife praising her good taste for enjoying the _Courtier_ of Castiglione--there is hardly a word or phrase which has become antiquated. This classic poetry was born with an old head on young shoulders, and had no youth. His finished form earned and kept for Garcilaso the rank of Prince of Castilian poets. In the latter part of the century he was twice edited--once at Salamanca in 1577 by the Humanist, Francisco Sanchez, called, from the name of his native town, Las Brozas, el Brocense, and best known as the author of the _Minerva_; and then at Seville by Hernan de Herrera. The edition of Herrera has a commentary on a large scale, and is of considerable value for the history of Spanish poetry; but it set an example which was followed to an excess of tiresome pedantry by the editors of Góngora and Camoens. It led to a famous and not unamusing