THAT kindly feeling for literature, which is the characteristic of the present day, and which beams equal patronage on every production of the cultivated mind, receiving with the same hospitable welcome the child of every native muse, has hardly yet displayed a genial warmth in fostering the offspring of a foreign soil, The translations of our own times have been distinguished more by their ability than by the encouragement they have met with from the public; and little anxiety has been manifested, on the whole, to improve our acquaintance with the languages from which they have been transfused. Our immediate approximation to, and our constant and daily intercourse with our neighbours the French, have indeed rendered their language the favourite accomplishment of all who aim at some addition to their mother-tongue; and a slight knowledge of the works which have been written in that language is necessarily implied as the medium, if not the aim, of its acquirement. Our opera, too, and the airs which are derived from it, and have become favourites in the musical circles of fashion, recommend the Italian to the notice of those who are charged with the education of young ladies, as an useful, if not a necessary, appendage to familiarity with the mysteries of waltzing and quadrilling; whilst the cessation of the long war which closed the Continent upon English travellers, admitting a vast influx into the provinces of Italy, has tended to facilitate to our youth of the male sex the pronunciation of the delicate language "dove il si suona ;" and to teach them the conversational idiom, which their former method of study, commencing with the reading of Tasso and concluding with Dante or Petrarch, as little enabled them to attain, as a draught from the "pure wells of English undefiled," that bubbled in the Elizabethan age, would render a foreigner au fait to the compliments of a London levee. But, though neither the prose writers of ancient nor modern Italy are yet suffered to occupy much of our attention, it is certain that no inconsiderable degree of interest has recently been excited for the productions of her later bards, one of whom (Alfieri) is pretty generally talked of, if not read. But rarely is a glance of enquiry cast towards the Spanish península. Spain offers no inducement to the traveller: the monotonous mould into which tyranny and anarchy have bent her national character, affords no relief that observation can seize on to describe, and music has not yet claimed her strains of poetry for its own. That noble language which, in the 17th century, every man eminent for rank or literature, in Italy, in Flanders, in Germany, in France, and even in Eng

VOL. I.-NO, I.

land,* would have blushed to have been thought ignorant of, is now the jargon of traffic; whilst its sister tongue, a scion of the same root, is almost wholly neglected and despised, except as a means of intercourse with the degenerate natives of the soil of Portugal. Those dramas which, at one period, were received on the same night with equal and eager approbation by a different audience at Madrid, at Brussels, at Munich, at Vienna, at Milan, and at Naples; which were imitated by Corneille, by Quinault, by Scarron, by Molière, by Shakspeare, by Fletcher, and by Dryden, have been thought worthy of translation only by a few German enthusiasts, and are not to be met with except in single plays or in small collections, having for the most part escaped the diligent search of those whose object it was to give an account of them. Of the thirty plays composed by Cervantes in his youth, only two can now be found; the two thousand dramas of Lope de Vega have dwindled into a moderate number, which are of rare occurrence; whilst Calderon owes a temporary reputation, as brilliant but as transient as the lights of the Aurora Borealis, to the eloquence of one solitary admirer, whose animated descriptions of his excellence have not yet tempted a single English pen to transfer his beauties to our language. If it be true that we have little acquaintance with Spanish literature, with much greater truth may it be affirmed that of the literature of Portugal we absolutely know nothing. The English language boasts but of two translations from the Portuguese, and both comprise portions of the works of Camoëns: we may hereafter have occasion to speak of the degree of fidelity with which these are executed. We have been led into these reflections by contemplating the practicability of re-awakening some slight interest for the productions of men of no common genius, who lived in no ordinary times ;-productions once so widely diffused, now so strangely neglected. In making the attempt, however, we shall select a few only from the host, and of these the limits of a work like the present will enable us to give but a very brief description. Were this not the case we should be deterred from undertaking the task on a longer scale, aware as we are that this subject has long occupied the pen of one of the ablest writers of his age, who possesses all the information that can be derived from learning and local knowledge, and every charm of eloquence to render that information interesting to others.

The first writer whom we would select for this purpose is Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; and, having mentioned his name in the same page with that of the great founder of Portuguese

* The marriage of Philip II, with Mary of England, and that of the Infanta Dona Maria Teresa, daughter of Philip III. with Louis XIII. of France, must have greatly increased the study of the Spanish language in the courts of London and Paris.

poetry, we are tempted to indulge in the melancholy pleasure of tracing a comparison between their lives and fortunes; being struck with a similarity which we think is more than fanciful. They were contemporaries. Camoëns was born in 1524-9;* Cervantes in 1547: they have continued fellows in survivorship, standing side by side in the annals of Fame, whilst names that were thought greater in their day, have been obliterated from its rolls. They both served as soldiers in the ranks the one lost an eye, the other a hand, in battles far from the native land of each, and in a warfare not essential to her interests, and yet both gloried in military exploits for which neither received a recompense. The former passed six years of his life in voluntary exile; the latter, nearly an equal period in slavery. They were both satirists, and visited by all the envy and malignity of their contemporaries: the mighty production of each was at first neglected and despised by all but its author, who saw with prophetic vision into futurity, and beheld the Babel of his fame rise above every petty tower by which it was then encompassed. Imprisonment for debt, poverty, and even beggary †, were the lot of both the one received from a monarch a pension of less than five pounds per annum, as a recompense for the dedication of his poem; and the other was more largely, but hardly more liberally rewarded by a Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo. On their death-beds the parallel will not hold good; for the lastrecorded expressions of the former were words of melancholy foreboding; whilst the dedication which the latter penned four days before he expired, was written in a strain of cheerful

* M. De Souza believes 1525, on the authority of Manoel de Faria, who discovered an entry in the register of India at Lisbon, which mentions the age of Camoëns at the period of his departure for the East.

The melancholy fact that Camoëns was supported in his last moments by alms, which his black servant gathered in the streets of Lisbon, has been frequently alluded to; but what Capmany states is not so generally known, that Cervantes was so reduced as to be compelled "to beg for his support, and to receive assistance by the hands of the servants of his patrons, with, perhaps, the additional mortification to his noble spirit, of having it bestowed with insult and reproaches: Anecdota," adds Capmany," muy curiosa y quiza mas importante de saberse que todos los que se ignoran de su vida privada :”"—a very curious anecdote, and perhaps more deserving of note than all which we are ignorant of, relating to the circumstances of his private life.-Teatro Historico Critico de la Eloquencia Espanola. Madrid, 1788. Tom. 4.

"At last death will terminate my sufferings, and it will be seen by all that my attachment to my country was so constant, that I was not merely satisfied with dying in her arms, but that I died with her."-Fragment of a letter of Camoens written in 1578. Vida de Camoes-Os Lusiadas. Edic. De Souza. Paris, 1819.

"I would not," writes Cervantes, "be called upon to apply to myself the old stanzas which begin thus, the foot already in the stirrup ;' for I may say, with a slight alteration, that my foot is already in the stirrup, since I feel the pangs of death are on me, my Lord, whilst I am penning this dedication. Yesterday the extreme unction was administered to me; to-day resume my pen: my time is short, my pains increase, my hopes diminish; nevertheless, I wish that enough of life remained to enable me to behold you once more in Spain." Dedication of" Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda," to the Conde de Lemos, dated 23d April, 1616.

ness, and even gaiety. Why should we attempt to carry the similitude farther? After the death of Cervantes, five cities of Spain disputed for the honour of having given him birth; and the countrymen of Camoëns, in the far distant kingdom of Brazil, have, within these few months, raised a tardy subscription for the erection of a monument to the memory of that great poet, whose burial-place was sought for by an English traveller at Lisbon, not many years back, and, after much difficulty, discovered beneath a stair-case!*

The resemblance which we have just noticed is purely accidental; but if we might cite a less ideal prototype of Cervantes, we should point it out in the creature of his own imagination. Let not the reader smile when he sees us compare him to his own Don Quixote. We are not certain that that noble character is always properly relished or duly appreciated. We entirely accord with M. Sismondi + in the judicious and feeling criticism, of which the following forms a part:

"There was, in fact, a tinge of knight-errantry in the character of Cervantes, whom the love of glory had drawn away from his studies and from the enjoyment of the pleasures of life, and fixed beneath the banners of Mark Anthony Colonna ;-who, without ever attaining a higher rank than that of a common soldier, exulted that he had lost an arm at the battle of Lepanto, and that he bore on his own person a monument of the greatest feat of arms in the annals of Christian warfare; --who, during his captivity at Algiers, did, by his incessant daring, excite the astonishment, and conciliate the esteem of the Moors; finally, who, after having received the extreme unction, and aware that the ensuing Sabbath must terminate his mortal career, contemplated the approach of death with that cheerful indifference which we have seen displayed in the preface and dedication of his "Persiles and Sigismunda." In these later productions I fancy we may recognize that he is himself the hero undeceived (détrompé), who at last becomes sensible of the vanity of glory, and the long delusion of a career of ambition, which contracted means had always rendered unsuccessful. And if it be true, that "to make mirth at our own expense is all the art of good taste," it is evident that Cervantes possessed that art in a high degree, since he has exposed, in a ludicrous point of view, the noblest exertions of his life. Every man, who is an enthusiast like Cervantes, will readily associate himself to this piece of pleasantry, which is yet a satire upon himself, directed against all that

* That traveller was the reviewer of Lord Strangford's Translations from Camoëns, in the Monthly Mirror for July 1803, (vol. 16); and the result of his enquiries was, in his own words, that "Camoëns, the glory of Portugal, lay buried under a stair-case in the nunnery (attached to the church of St. Anne, at Lisbon); and that no man could be admitted to visit his ashes." The epitaph placed over his grave by D. Gonzalo Coutinho, a short time after his death, was, as this reviewer remarks, "no lying epitaph:""Here lies Luis de Camoens, the Prince of the Poets of his time: he lived poor and miserable, and so he died."

+ Sismondi-De la Littérature du Midi de l'Europe. Tom. 3. p. 342.

he most loves and respects, but tending not to reflect upon him the slightest discredit.”

On that most important work of Cervantes-a work in every one's hands, which is translated into every language of Europe, which is the delight of the young and the amusement of the old, it would be both presumptuous and superfluous to reiterate criticism. "It has become my province," says the ingenious Spaniard we have before referred to*, "to enter into a rigid examination of the writings of this celebrated author. But my single judgment, if it differed but a hair's breadth from the sentiments of so many learned men who have spoken of him in terms of eulogium, would not possess the slightest claim to be heard; neither, though it accord with the judgment of all intelligent critics, will it add to the justly-merited reputation of the author of Don Quixote, more than one feeble note to swell the echo of that fame which has sounded his name to the four corners of the earth." But it is our hope, as it will be our aim, to give the English reader an idea, however imperfect, of other works by the same author, displaying occasionally, in particular passages, equal talent, and none of them wholly unworthy the pen of Cervantes.

We proceed, then, to notice "the less celebrated productions of the author of Don Quixote," or rather, those works which are scarcely known, and have only been in part, if at all, translated into our language. We commence our account with the two plays that are extant out of the number brought on the stage by Cervantes in the earlier part of his literary career. They were his second productions, and immediately followed the publication of his Galatea, which made its appearance about the years 1581-4, shortly after his escape from slavery at Algiers and his arrival at Madrid. But previous to exhibiting Cervantes as a dramatic writer, it may be thought necessary to say something respecting the formation of that school of dramatic literature denominated by some German writers the ROMANTIC THEATRE.† But powerful and clearly convincing as is their general argument, there are particular points wherein the turn of sentiment peculiar to the German people seems to us to influence their judgment; and, as the examination of these points would necessarily involve us in a wide field of discussion, which would occupy more space than we can here afford, we must be content to defer all observations on this subject until a future opportunity. Neither is it so essential to the proper understanding of the plays of Cervantes

Capmany, Teat. Hist. Crit. &c. Tom. 4. p. 426.

+ This epithet is used but in one sense in English, although the French have two words to express it, i. e. romantique and romanesque; it must be here understood to mean that style of dramatic writing which rose with the southern languages of Europe.