led many minor versifiers. These
poetasters, afraid of overstepping the limits of
good sense, tabooed all imagination and described in
deliberately prosy lines the most commonplace events. The
movement reached its height at the beginning of the reign
of Charles IV (1788-1808) and produced such efforts as
a poem to the gout, a nature-poem depicting barn-yard
sounds, and even Iriarte's _La musica_ (1780), in which
one may read in carefully constructed _silvas_ the
definition of diatonic and chromatic scales.

II

SPANISH LYRIC POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Early in the nineteenth century the armies of Napoleon
invaded Spain. There ensued a fierce struggle for the
mastery of the Peninsula, in which the latent strength and
energy of the Spaniards became once more evident. The page xxxii
French devastated parts of the country, but they
brought with them many new ideas which, together with the
sharpness of the conflict, served to awaken the Spanish
people from their torpor and to give them a new
realization of national consciousness. During this period
of stress and strife two poets, Quintana and Gallego,
urged on and encouraged their fellow countrymen with
patriotic songs.

Manuel Jose QUINTANA (1772-1857) had preeminently the
"gift of martial music," and great was the influence
of his odes _Al armamento de las provincias contra los
franceses_ and _A Espana despues de la revolucion de
marzo_. He also strengthened the patriotism of his people
by his prose _Vidas de espanoles celebres_ (begun in
1806): the Cid, the Great Captain (Gonzalo de Cordoba),
Pizarro and others of their kind. In part a follower
of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century,
Quintana sang also of humanity and progress, as in his ode
on the invention of printing. In politics Quintana was a
liberal; in religious beliefs, a materialist. Campoamor
has said of Quintana that he sang not of faith or
pleasures, but of duties. His enemies have accused him
of stirring the colonies to revolt by his bitter sarcasm
directed at past and contemporaneous Spanish rulers, but
this is doubtless an exaggeration. It may be said that
except in his best patriotic poems his verses lack lyric
merit and his ideas are wanting in insight and depth; but
his sincerity of purpose was in the main beyond question
and he occasionally gave expression to striking boldness
of thought and exaltation of feeling. In technique