Note 834 — Chapter XXVIII

“Las Navas de Tolosa,” twenty cantos, Madrid, 1594, 12mo;—“La Restauracion de España,” ten cantos, Madrid, 1607, 12mo;—“El Patron de España,” six books, Madrid, 1611, 12mo, with Rimas added. My copy of the last volume is one of the many proofs that new title-pages with later dates were attached to Spanish books that had been some time before the public. Mr. Southey, to whom this copy once belonged, expresses his surprise, in a MS. note on the fly-leaf, that the last half of the volume should be dated in 1611, while the first half is dated in 1612. But the reason is, that the title-page to the Rimas comes at p. 94, in the middle of a sheet, and could not conveniently be cancelled and changed, as was the title-page to the “Patron de España,” with which the volume opens. Mesa’s translations are later;—the Æneid, Madrid, 1615, 12mo; and the Eclogues of Virgil, to which he added a few more Rimas and the poor tragedy of “Pompeio,” Madrid, 1618, 12mo. The ottava rima seems to me very cumbrous in both these translations, and unsuited to their nature, though we are reconciled to it, and to the terza rima, in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, by Viana, a Portuguese, printed at Valladolid, in 1589, 4to; one of the happiest translations made in the pure age of Castilian literature. The Iliad, which Mesa is also supposed to have translated, was never printed. In one of his epistles, (Rimas, 1611, f. 201), he says he was bred to the law; and in another, (f. 205), that he loved to live in Castile, though he was of Estremadura. In many places he alludes to his poverty and to the neglect he suffered; and in a sonnet in his last publication, (1618, f. 113), he shows a poor, craven spirit in flattering the Count de Lemos, with whom he was offended for not taking him to Naples.