Note 456 — Chapter II · THE ITALIAN DECADENCE AND THE SPANIARDS.

Omnes dilaberentur. Señor Menéndez (iii. 444) gives all the important parts, both in Latin and Spanish. R. de[l] Turia, infra, has been reprinted, but the marrow of him also will be found in the Historia, as well as much else: for instance, an interesting Invectiva y Apologia, by Francesco de la Barreda in 1622, which is dignified by the words: “There was no greater dramatic-poetic written in the seventeenth century”—a large statement. But Barreda is certainly a staunch anti-Unitarian, and has well reached the important doctrine that “Art is merely a careful observation of classified [graduados] examples.” The whole dispute, in which the more or less great names of the Argensolas, Artieda, Cristóbal de Mesa, and others, figure, together with the subsequent one on culteranism, will be found exhaustively treated in the tenth chapter of the Historia, and more summarily, but still usefully, in Ticknor. Since most of the text was written M. Morel-Fatio, in his Défenseurs de la Comedia (v. sup., p. 343), has subjoined Turia to Tirso, and a certain Carlos Boyl to both, adding a notice of the Frenchman Ogier (v. sup., pp. 256, 257), who is already familiar to readers of these pages. Boyl, one of the Valencian group above referred to, wrote in “romance” form rules of the comedia nueva.