Note 716 — Chapter XXIII
Reading edition
In the Library of the Academy of History at Madrid (Misc. Hist., MS., Tom. III., No. 2) is a poem by Diego Lopez de Haro, of about a thousand lines, in a manuscript apparently of the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century, of which I have a copy. It is entitled “Aviso para Cuerdos,”—A Word for the Wise,—and is arranged as a dialogue, with a few verses spoken in the character of some distinguished personage, human or superhuman, allegorical, historical, or from Scripture, and then an answer to each, by the author himself. In this way above sixty persons are introduced, among whom are Adam and Eve, with the Angel that drove them from Paradise, Troy, Priam, Jerusalem, Christ, Julius Cæsar, and so on down to King Bamba and Mahomet. The whole is in the old Spanish verse, and has little poetical thought in it, as may be seen by the following words of Saul and the answer by Don Diego, which I give as a favorable specimen of the entire poem:—
Saul. En mi pena es de mirar, Que peligro es para vos El glosar u el mudar Lo que manda el alto Dios; Porque el manda obedecelle; No juzgalle, mas creelle. A quien a Dios a de entender, Lo que el sabe a de saber.
Autor. Pienso yo que en tal defecto Cae presto el coraçon Del no sabio en rreligion, Creyendo que a lo perfecto Puede dar mas perficion. Este mal tiene el glosar; Luego a Dios quiere enmendar.
Oviedo, in his “Quinquagenas,” says that Diego Lopez de Haro was “the mirror of gallantry among the youth of his time”; and he is known to history for his services in the war of Granada, and as Spanish ambassador at Rome. (See Clemencin, in Mem. de la Acad. de Hist., Tom. VI. p. 404.) He figures in the “Inferno de Amor” of Sanchez de Badajoz; and his poems are found in the Cancionero General, 1573, ff. 82-90, and a few other places.