is said that "Placido"
recited aloud the last stanza on his way to the place of
execution, and that he slipped to a friend in the crowd a
scrap of cloth on which the prayer was written.

=191.=--4. =del... transparencia= = _a_ (in) _la clara
transparencia del aire_.

Avellaneda: see _Introduction_, p. xxxviii.

19. =No... modelo= = _(la historia) no [dio] modelo a tu
virtud en lo pasado_.

21. =otra= = _otra copia_.

=192.=--1-2. =Miro... victoria= = _la Europa miro al genio
de la guerra y la victoria ensangrentar su suelo_. The
=genio= was Napoleon Bonaparte.

4. =Al... cielo= = _el cielo le diera al genio del bien_.
Note that =le= is dative and =al genio= accusative. This
otherwise admirable sonnet is marred by the numerous
inversions of the word-order.

=193.=--=Ecuador= is a relatively small and mountainous
country, lying, as the name implies, directly on the
equator. The two principal cities are Guayaquil, a port
on the Pacific coast, and Quito, the capital. Quito is
beautifully situated on a plateau 9300 feet above the
level of the sea. The climate is mild and salubrious,
and drier than at Bogota. The early Spanish colonists
repeatedly wrote of the beautiful scenery and the "eternal
spring" of Quito.
page 297
All of the present Ecuador belonged to the Virreinato del
Peru till 1721, after which date Quito and the contiguous
territory were governed from Bogota. In 1824 Guayaquil
and southern Ecuador were forcibly annexed to the first
Colombia by Bolivar. Six years later Ecuador separated
from Colombia and organized as a separate state.

In the territory now known as Ecuador the first colleges
were established about the middle of the sixteenth
century, by the Franciscans, for the natives, and by
the Jesuits, as elsewhere in America, for the sons of
Spaniards. Several chronicles by priests and other
explorers were written during the early years of
the colonial period; but no poet appears before the
seventeenth century. In 1675 the Jesuit Jacinto de Evia
published at Madrid his _Ramillete de varias flores
poeticas_ which contains, beside those by Evia, verses
by Antonio Bastidas, a Jesuit teacher, and by Hernando
Dominguez Camargo, a Colombian. The verses are mediocre
or worse, and, as the date would imply, are imbued with
culteranism.

The best verses of the eighteenth century were collected
by the priest Juan de Velasco (1727-1819) an