Note 218 — BOOK VI.

Francisco de Figueroa, el Divino, was born at Alcalá de Henares in 1536 and is conjectured to have died as late as 1620. Very little is known of this distinguished poet. He is said to have served as a soldier in Italy where his verses won him so high a reputation that he was compared to Petrarch. He married Doña María de Vargas on February 14, 1575, at Alcalá de Henares, and travelled with the Duque de Terranova through the Low Countries in 1597. After this date he disappears. He is stated to have died at Lisbon, and to have directed that all his poems should be burned. Such of them as were saved were published at Lisbon in 1626 by Luis Tribaldos de Toledo. As noted in the Introduction (p. xxxi. n. 2) to the present version, Figueroa is the Tirsi of the Galatea. There is a strong family likeness between the poems of Figueroa and those of the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre, whose verses were issued by Quevedo in 1631. So marked is this resemblance that, as M. Ernest Mérimée has written:—"Un critique, que le paradoxe n'effraierait point, pourrait, sans trop de peine, soutenir l'identité de Francisco de la Torre et de Francisco de Figueroa." See his admirable Essai sur la vie et les œuvres de Francisco de Quevedo (Paris, 1886), p. 324.