Note 371 — Chapter VI

“Discurso sobre las Comedias Españolas de Don Agustin de Montiano y Luyando,” Madrid, 1750, 12mo; Discurso Segundo, Madrid, 1753, 12mo. They were translated into French by Hermilly, and an account of them and their author is given in Lessing’s Werke, (Berlin, 1794, 18mo, Band XXIII. p. 95,) where we learn, that Montiano was born in 1697, and that he published, in 1729, “El Robo de Dina,” which seems to have been so much in the tone of a play with the same title, in the seventeenth volume of Lope de Vega’s “Comedias,” that I cannot help thinking Montiano, following the fashion of Cañizares and the other plunderers of the time, was indebted largely to his great predecessor, the enemy of whose reputation he afterwards became. The story of Athaulpho is from the Corónica General, Parte II. c. 22. The “Virginia,” both in its attempt to exhibit Roman manners and in its poetical power, suffers severely when compared with Alfieri’s tragedy on the same subject. But the truth is, Montiano was a slavish imitator of the French school, which he admired so much as to be unable to comprehend and feel what was best in his own Castilian. In the “Aprobacion,” which he prefixed to the edition of Avellaneda, published in 1732, he says, comparing the second part of Don Quixote, by this pretender, with the true one by Cervantes,—“I think no man of judgment will give an opinion in favor of Cervantes, if he compares the two parts together.”