Note 297 — FIRST SECTION. History of Spanish Poetry and Eloquence, from the Introduction of the Italian Style to the Age of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. (continued 2)

This piece of silly adulation, is entitled Hesperodia; that is to say, evening song or morning song. The former, however, appears to be the more appropriate title, since the author doubtless wrote it in his old age. It has been drawn from the obscurity in which it ought to have remained, and printed in the eighth vol. of the Parnaso Español. Bermudez, in an affected strain of language, and with true Dominican fanaticism, extols the monstrous barbarity with which the great Duke of Alba persecuted the heretics of the Netherlands, and made “the cold northern waters flow the more fiercely from the infusion of warm blood.”