At this period lived the three poets whose verses have possessed most amenity, richness, and facility. The first is Balbuena, born in La Mancha, educated in Mexico, and author of _El Siglo de Oro_ and of _Bernardo_. No one, since Garcilasso, has had such command over the language, versification, and rhyme; and no one, at the same time, is more slovenly and unequal. His poem, like that New World in which the author lived, is a country spacious and immense, as fruitful as uncultivated, where briers and thorns are mingled in confusion with flowers, treasures with scarcity, deserts and morasses with hills and forests more sublime and shady. If at times he surprises by the freedom of his verse, by the novelty and vividness of his expression, by his great talent for description, in which he knows no equal, and even occasionally by his boldness and profundity of thought, he yet more frequently offends by his unseasonable prodigality, and inconceivable carelessness. The greatest defect of the _Bernardo_, is its excessive length; it being morally impossible to give to a work of five thousand octaves the sustained and continued elegance necessary to give pleasure. The eclogues of the _Siglo de Oro_ have not the same defects of composition as the poem, and in the public estimation enjoy the nearest place to those of Garcilasso. They undoubtedly deserve it, considering the propriety of style, the ease of the verse, the suitableness and freshness of the images, and the simplicity of the invention. If his shepherds were not at times so rude, if he had had a more constant eye to elegance in diction, and beauty in the incidents; if, in short, he had thrown more variety into his versification, reduced almost entirely to tercetos,--there is no doubt but that good taste would have conceded to him in this branch of the art an absolute supremacy. The second of these poets is Jauregui, celebrated for his translation of the Aminta, a florid poet, an elegant and harmonious versifier. He is the one who expressed his thoughts in verse with the most ease and elegance; but he had little nerve and spirit, and was, besides, poor of invention. His taste in early life was very pure, as his _Rimas_ show. But after having been one of the sharpest assailants of _Purism_, he ended in suffering himself to glide with the current, and in his translation of the Pharsalia, and in his _Orpheus_, he has abandoned himself to all the extravagances he had before burlesqued.