He attempted another innovation, which required for its establishment greater powers than his. He set himself to compose Castilian sapphics, hexameters, and distichs; and although the specimens he published are not altogether unsuccessful, especially the sapphic, from its analogy to endecasyllabic verse,[L] he has had no successor in this enterprise. The hexameter demands a prosody more determinate and fixed than the Spanish language possesses, to satisfy the ear; and therefore the imitation of it is so much the more difficult, not to say impossible. He would, doubtless, however, have enriched the art by establishing this novelty, had it not been necessary, for this purpose, that the art were then in its infancy, in order that the docile and flexible language might accommodate itself to the will of the poet, and had he been the colossal genius that could subjugate others, and dictate to them a law of like versification. It was an unfortunate time to introduce fresh measures, when the fine endecasyllabics of Garcilasso, Leon, and Herrera were known, and when the consistency and fixedness of the language and poetry did not permit them to retrocede to their infancy, which was absolutely necessary to exercise them in the manège of Latin versification. The reputation of this poet did not then correspond to the proud hopes he cherished when he published his book. In this, he insulted Cervantes, scoffed at Góngora, jested with Lope de Vega; and, fancying himself some superior star about to eclipse his cotemporaries, he represented himself at the head of his _Eroticas_, as a rising sun extinguishing the stars with its rays, and raised the arrogant note,--_Sicut sol matutinus: me surgente, quid istæ?_ Even if he had united in himself the talents of Horace, Pindar, and Anacreon, in all their extent and purity, from which he was yet far distant, this would have been an unpardonable boast, which not even his youth could excuse. The public is always greater than any writer, how great soever he may be; and it is necessary for him to present himself before it with modesty, unless he wishes to pass for a madman or a fool. Villegas, after impertinently irritating his equals, caused no sensation on the public, but attracted the rude and biting sarcasms of Góngora, and the just and moderate reprehension of Lope.[M] He was consigned to oblivion till the appearance of the Parnaso Español, in which collection he had an eminent place; from that time, he was again printed, with a prefatory discourse, in which Don Vincente de los Rios, a man of vast learning and exquisite taste, but on this occasion too good-natured, assigned to him the palm of lyric poetry, which no subsequent critic has confirmed.