Note 24 — Chapter XXXI

The poems of Boscan and Silvestre are found in their respective works, already examined; but of Francisco de Castilla and of Juan de Mendoza and their poetry it may be proper to give some notice, as their names have not occurred before.

Castilla was a gentleman apparently of the old national type, descended from an illegitimate branch of the family of Pedro el Cruel. He lived in the time of Charles V., and passed his youth near the person of that great sovereign; but, as he says in a letter to his brother, the Bishop of Calahorra, he at last “withdrew himself, disgusted alike with the abhorred rabble and senseless life of the court,” and “chose the estate of matrimony, as one more safe for his soul and better suited to his worldly condition.” How he fared in this experiment he does not tell us; but, missing, in the retirement it brought with it, those pleasures of social intercourse to which he had been accustomed, he bought, as he says, “with a small sum of money, other surer and wiser friends,” whose counsels and teachings he put into verse, that his weak memory might the better preserve them. The result of this life merely contemplative was a book, in which he gives us, first, his “Theórica de Virtudes,” or an explanation, in the old short Spanish verse, accompanied with a prose gloss, of the different Virtues, ending with the vengeful Nemesis; next, a Treatise on Friendship, in long nine-line stanzas; and then, successively, a Satire on Human Life and its vain comforts; an Allegory on Worldly Happiness; a series of Exhortations to Virtue and Holiness, which he has unsuitably called Proverbs; and a short discussion, in décimas, on the Immaculate Conception. At the end, separately paged, as if it were quite a distinct treatise, we have a counterpart to the “Theórica de Virtudes,” called the “Prática de las Virtudes de los Buenos Reyes de España”; a poem in above two hundred octave stanzas, on the Virtues of the Kings of Spain, beginning with Alaric the Goth and ending with the Emperor Charles V., to whom he dedicates it with abundance of courtly flattery. The whole volume, both in the prose and verse, is written in the strong old Castilian style, sometimes encumbered with learning, but oftener rich, pithy, and flowing. The following stanza, written, apparently, when its author was already disgusted with his court life, but had not given it up, may serve as a specimen of his best manner:—

An edition of Castilla’s very rare volume may have been printed about 1536, when it was licensed; but I have never seen it, nor any notice of it. The one of which I have a copy was printed at Zaragoza, 4to, lit. got., 1552; and I believe there is one of Alcalá, either in 1554 or 1564, 8vo.

The poetry of Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, who was Regidor of Madrid, and a member of the Cortes of 1544, is, perhaps, more rare than that of Castilla, and is contained in a small volume printed at Alcalá in 1550, and entitled “Buen Placer trovado en treze discantes de quarta rima Castellana segun imitacion de trobas Francesas,” etc. It consists of thirteen discourses on a happy life, its means and motives, all written in stanzas of four lines each, which their author calls French, I suppose, because they are longer lines than those in the old national measures, and rhymed alternately,—the rhymes of one stanza running into the next. At the end is a Canto Real, as it is called, on a verse in the Psalms, composed in the same manner; and several smaller poems, one of which is a kind of religious villancico, and four of them sonnets. The tone of the whole is didactic, and its poetical value small. I cite eight lines, as a specimen of its peculiar manner and rhymes:—

Mendoza was a person of much consideration in his time, and is noticed as such by Quintana, (Historia de Madrid, Madrid, 1629, folio,) who gives one of his sonnets at f. 27, and a sketch of his character at f. 245.