Note 201 — Chapter XXXVII

The letters of Argensola are in the “Cartas de Varios Autores Españoles,” by Mayans y Siscar, (Valencia, 1773, 5 tom. 12mo,)—itself a monument of the poverty of Spanish literature in that department from which it attempts to make a collection, since by far the greater part of it consists of old printed dedications, formal epistles of approbation that had been prefixed to books when they were first published, lives of authors that had served as prefaces to their works, etc. The letters of Quevedo and Lope are chiefly on literary subjects, and are scattered through their respective writings. Those of Antonio and Solís are in a small volume published by Mayans at Lyons, in 1733; to which may be added those at the end of Antonio’s “Censura de Historias Fabulosas,” Madrid, 1742, fol. The “Cartas Philologicas” of Cascales, (of which there is a neat edition by Sanchez, Madrid, 1779, 8vo,) are to Spain and the age in which they were written what the terse and pleasant letters published by Melmoth, under the pseudonyme of Fitzosborne, are to England in the reign of George II.,—an attempt to unite as much learning as the public would bear with an infusion of lighter matter in discussions connected with morals and manners.