more violent in English than in Spanish:-- Piramo fueron y Tisbe, _Pyramus they were and Tisbe,_ Los que en verso hizo culto _Those who in verse made[16] polished_ El Licenciado Nason _The Licentiate Naso_ Bien romo ó bien narigudo _Maybe snub, maybe beak_ Dejar el dulce candor _To leave the sweet white_ Lastimosamente obscuro _Lamentably dark_ Al que, túmulo de seda, _Of that which, tomb of silk,_ Fue de los dos casquilucios _Was of the two feather-heads_ Moral que los hospedó _Mulberry which gave them shelter_ Y fue condenando al punto _And was condemned at once_ Si del Tigris no en raizes _If by the Tigris not in root_ De los amantes en frutos. _By the lovers in fruit._ Don Cristobal de Salazar Mardones explains in prose, and with copious references to Ovid, _Meta._, lib. iv., that what this means is that the mulberry-tree was not torn up by the roots as a punishment by the Tigris, but was coloured by the blood of the lovers. The reader will see at once that this is puerile nonsense, and that it is a mere trick. It is also a very old trick. When Thiodolf of Hvin, whose verse riddles adorn the _Heimskringla_, wrote of a certain king-- “Now hath befallen In Frodi’s house The word of fate To fall on Fiolnir; That the windless wave Of the wild bull’s spears That lord should do To death by drowning,”-- he was writing in “góngorina especie”--that is, in what was to be the manner of Góngora. The whole secret lay, as Lope de Vega, indeed, pointed out, in never calling anything by its right name, and in transposing words violently. Given a great deal of bad taste, and a puerile mania for making people stare, and the thing is easily accounted for. In such conditions it may be thought clever to call mead which men drink out of horns “the windless wave of the wild bull’s spear,” or to describe a mulberry-tree as a tumulus of silk, though the mistake was incomparably more excusable in Thiodolf of Hvin than in Góngora, and the Norseman seems on the whole to have been the least silly of the two. The comparison which has been made between Góngorism and our own metaphysical school is too favourable to the Spaniards, in whom there was absolutely nothing but juggling with words.