From this contradiction springs so often the effort and difficulty with which he writes in both kinds of composition. His style, in prose as in verse, in serious as in jocose, is always struck forth without connexion or graduation, sacrificing almost always truth and nature to exaggeration and hyperbole. His imagination was most vivid and brilliant, but superficial and negligent; and the poetic genius that animates him, sparkles but does not glow, surprises but does not agitate, bounds with impetuosity and force, but neither flies nor ever supports itself at the same elevation. The rage of expressing things with novelty made him call the brink of the sea _the law of the sand_; love, _the civil war of the born_; trunks of trees on which lovers' names are engraved, _a rural book written in enamel_. In burlesque verse, he heaps together forced allusions, ambiguities, and paragraphs of nonsense. A ruffian, to denote how keenly he has felt his disgrace, will say, that he has wept _rope for rope_, and not, at every lash; he will say, that he has had _more grasshoppers than the summer, more tenants than the tomb, more bookstrings than the missal_. I am well aware that Quevedo often diverts with what he writes, and raves because it is his pleasure: I know that puns have their proper place in such compositions, and that no one has used them more happily than he. But every thing has its bounds; and, heaped together with a prodigality like his, instead of pleasing, they create only weariness. The same incorrectness and bad taste that mark his style, composed of words and phrases noble and sublime, united with others as mean and trivial, are found in his images and thoughts, which are mixed together without economy, judgment, or decorum. The following sonnet will show this miserable confusion better than any description:-- "Cæsar, the fortunate and forceful, bled; Pity and warning know it not--a wreath This of his glory, for there is a death Even to the grave that sepulchres the dead. Dies life, and like life, dies, and soon is fled The rich and sumptuous funeral; time flies, And, in his unseen circuit, stills the cries, Shouts, and huzzas, that fame delights to spread. The sun and moon wind night and day the web Of the world's life robust, and dost thou weep The warning which age sends thee? all things ebb! Auroras are but smiling illnesses, Delight the lemon of our health, nor less Our sextons the sure hours that seem to creep."