Note 258 — Chapter XIV

The details of the festival, with the poems offered on the occasion, were neatly printed at Madrid, in 1620, in a small quarto, ff. 140, and fill about three hundred pages in the eleventh volume of Lope’s Works. The number of poetical offerings was great, but much short of what similar contests sometimes produced. Figueroa says in his “Pasagero,” (Madrid, 1617, 12mo, f. 118), that, at a festival, held a short time before, in honor of St. Antonio of Padua, five thousand poems of different kinds were offered; which, after the best of them had been hung round the church and the cloisters of the monks who originally proposed the prizes, were distributed to other monasteries. The custom extended to America. In 1585, Balbuena carried away a prize in Mexico from three hundred competitors. See his Life, prefixed to the Academy’s edition of his “Siglo de Oro,” Madrid, 1821, 8vo.