If the invention of this picture, which, without doubt, is the product of a comprehensive and philosophical mind, had belonged exclusively to our poet, his merit would be infinitely greater, and we must have conceded to him, in a plan so noble, the gift of genius. But the terrible visions of Dante and the _Trionfi_ of Petrarch being now known in Spain, the force of fancy necessary to create the plan and argument of the _Laberinto_, appears much less; Mena having done nothing more than imitate these writers, changing the situation of the scene in which he places his allegorical world. His sentiments are noble and grand, his views just and virtuous. We see him take advantage of his subject, and apostrophize therein the monarch of Castile, reminding him that his laws should not be like spiders' webs, but curb alike the strong and the weak: elsewhere he prays him to repress the horror of a practice that was then growing common, of poisonings between the closest connexions; now he is indignant at the barbarism which had burnt the books of D. Enrique de Villena;[C] and now he represents the slaughters and disorders in Castile, as a punishment for the repose in which the grandees were leaving the infidels, in order to attend solely to their own ambition and avarice. Juan de Mena expresses himself generally with more fire and energy than delicacy and grace; his course is unequal; his verses at times are bold and resonant, at others, they grow weak for want of cadence and metre; his style, animated, vivid, and natural at times, occasionally borders on the turgid and the trivial: language, in fine, in his hands is a slave that he holds but to obey him, and follow willingly or by compulsion the impulse which the poet gives it. No one has manifested, in this way, either greater boldness or loftier pretension; he suppresses syllables, modifies phrases at his will, lengthens or contracts words at his pleasure, and when he does not find in his own language the expressions, or modes of expression, which he wants, he sets himself to search for them in the Latin, the French, the Italian, in short, where he can. Spanish idiom not being yet finished in its formation, gave occasion and opportunity for these licenses,--licenses which would have been converted into privileges of poetic language, if the talents of this writer had been greater, and his reputation more permanent. The poets of the following age, whilst polishing the harshnesses of diction, and making an innovation in the metres and subjects of their compositions, did not preserve the noble freedom and acquisitions which their predecessors had gained in favour of the tongue. Had they followed their example in this, the Castilian language, and, above all, the language of its poetry, so harmonious, so various, so elegant and majestic, would have had no cause to envy the richness and flexibility of any other. The _Laberinto_ has met with the fate of