to such pursuits, at least in verse, the character of romantic passion. His looks, however, were not calculated to recommend him to the fair sex; for his biographers state that he was far from handsome, and that the glance of his fiery eye was more repulsive than inviting. But Mendoza was active, accomplished, and in the possession of power; and the favour which these advantages obtained for him with some Roman ladies, was numbered among the offences with which his enemies loudly reproached him. The repeated charges brought against him made at last an impression on the emperor; and that monarch, who had begun to contemplate the resignation of his crown, and who was now desirous of establishing tranquillity in his states, thought fit, in the year 1554, to recall this too rigid governor to Spain.
The latter part of the history of Mendoza’s life is not uniformly related by his biographers. According to some he retired to the country, devoted himself to poetry and philosophy, and appeared very seldom at the court of Philip II. Others assert that, though he no longer retained his former influence, he continued a member of the council of state under Philip II. and was present with that monarch at the great battle of St. Quintin, fought in the year 1557. This much is certain, that he was soon after engaged in an adventure at the court, which, for a man of his age and knowledge of the world, was of a very singular nature. An altercation arose in the palace between him and a courtier, who, according to Mendoza’s own declaration, was his rival in the affections of a lady. This man, whose name is not mentioned, in a fit of violent exasperation, drew a dagger; upon which Mendoza seized him, and threw him from a balcony into the street. What afterwards became of his antagonist is not recorded; but the transaction was the subject of serious observation, and the grave Philip regarded it as a high offence against the dignity of his person and his court. He was, however, content to inflict a moderate punishment, and merely condemned Mendoza to a short imprisonment. The old statesman occupied the period of his imprisonment in the ancient Spanish style, namely, in composing lamentations on the unkindness of his mistress:171 and these romantic effusions do not appear to have been considered by his contemporaries as absurd and ridiculous at his time of life. But the sorrows expressed in his amatory ditties did not drive the venerable lover to despair; for when he was soon after set at liberty, though still exiled from court, he observed with the eye of a politician the insurrection of the Moriscoes, or converted Arabs of Granada; and when the insurrection broke out into a formal war, he noted down all the remarkable events, and afterwards detailed them in an historical work, which has obtained for him the name of the Spanish Sallust. He profited of this opportunity to collect a great number of Arabic manuscripts. Observations on the works of Aristotle, a translation of the Mechanics of that philosopher, and some political treatises, were, it appears, the last of his literary labours. He was thus actively and usefully employed until his death, which happened when he was upwards of seventy, at Valladolid, in the year 1575. He bequeathed his collection of books and manuscripts to the king, and it still forms one of the most valuable portions of the library of the Escurial.172
A detailed account of the life of this distinguished man, cannot be regarded as a biographical excrescence in a history of Spanish Literature; for in no other poet’s life and works is the real Castilian spirit of the age of Charles V. so clearly displayed as in those of Diego de Mendoza. The universality of his literary talent will be best understood, when it is known with what energy, precision, and facility he accommodated himself to, and controuled the circumstances in which he happened to be placed in all the practical relations of life. That trait too in the portrait of his mind, which is most worthy of observation, namely, the constancy with which, instead of abandoning one species of mental activity for another, he continued throughout the different periods of his life, from youth to extreme old age, always to unite in his person the poet, the man of letters, and the statesman, gives reason to expect that his works, however differing in kind, will be found to possess a certain common character.
Diego de Mendoza did more for the poetic literature of his country than his countrymen seem to have acknowledged. Spanish writers, it is true, place him next in rank to Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega, among the poets who introduced the Italian style into Castilian poetry. But they cannot pardon the harshness of his versification in those poems in which he adopted the metrical forms of Italy. Rendered fastidious by the rhythmical harmony which a Castilian ear can never dispense with, the Spaniards have held in very trifling estimation the epistles of Mendoza; though those compositions, in a striking manner, extended the boundaries of Castilian poetry. As an epistolary poet, he might justly be styled the Spanish Horace, if his tercets flowed as smoothly as the hexameters of the latin poet. Making allowance, however, for the want of that pure harmony and that didactic delicacy in which Horace is inimitable, Mendoza’s epistles may rank among the best productions of the kind in modern literature. With the exception of Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega, no Spanish poet had evinced any traces of that horatian spirit with which this author was endowed. In the collection of Mendoza’s poems, these epistles are merely called cartas (letters.) Some of them are of a romantic cast, and overloaded with tedious love complaints. But the rest, like Horace’s epistles, are didactic, full of agreeable but sound philosophy, precise and yet unconstrained in expression, and rescued from the monotonous effect of moral instruction, by a happy interchange of precepts, images, and characters. A masculine understanding, which clearly penetrates all social relations, and a noble spirit, which estimates the blessings of life according to their real value, diffuse over these epistles a charm at once serene and attractive. Some of the most beautiful, for example, that addressed to Boscan, which is best known, and which on account of the answer is printed among Boscan’s poems, were composed in Italy during the more early part of the author’s life. But in estimating the poetical works of Mendoza, chronological arrangement is of little importance, for as a poet he preserved equality from the commencement to the close of his career. His epistle to Boscan is in part an imitation of that of Horace to Numicius.173 The latter half, however, belongs exclusively to Mendoza. In this portion of the epistle he presents to his friend the outline of the charming picture of domestic happiness, to which Boscan himself, in the answer already mentioned, has given a higher finish; and the taste which can overlook the beauty of this picture on account of want of smoothness in the versification, must be depraved by the affectation of refinement.174 Another epistle, addressed to Don Luis de Zuñiga, contains an ingenious and striking comparison of the character of two heterogeneous and equally foolish classes of men. The one wholly attached to the vulgar pleasures of the moment, and stupidly indifferent to the affairs of the world;175 while the other, on the contrary, is cheated by restless cares and anxieties out of the enjoyment of the present.176 In these epistles, Mendoza unfolded the result of his experience, as the Infante Juan Manuel did a century and a half earlier, in his Count Lucanor, though in a totally different manner. Mendoza’s style is that of an accomplished man of the world, formed in the school of the latin poets.
Mendoza’s sonnets possess neither the grace nor the harmony essential to that species of composition. They owe their existence to the amatory spirit of the age rather than to the poetic inspiration of the author. Though he composed in the Italian manner with less facility than Boscan and Garcilaso, he felt more correctly than they or any other of his countrymen, the difference between the Spanish and Italian languages, with respect to their capabilities for versification. The Spanish admits of none of those pleasing elisions, which, particularly when terminating vowels are omitted, render the mechanism of Italian versification so easy, and enable the poet to augment or diminish the number of syllables according to his pleasure; and this difference in the two languages renders the composition of a Spanish sonnet a difficult task. Still more does the Spanish language seem hostile to the soft termination of a succession of feminine rhymes, for the Spanish poet, who adopts this rule of the Italian sonnet, is compelled to banish from his rhymes, all infinitives of verbs, together with a whole host of sonorous substantives and adjectives.177 Mendoza, therefore, availed himself of the use of masculine rhymes in his sonnets; but this metrical license was strongly censured by all partizans of the Italian style. Nevertheless had he given to his sonnets more of the tenderness of Petrarch, it is probable that they would have found imitators. Some of them, indeed, may be considered as successful productions, and throughout all the language is correct and noble.178
Mendoza’s canciones have nearly the same character as his sonnets, except that they more obviously mark the influence of the horatian ode on the lyric fancy of the author. The versification, which is sonorous, though deficient in harmony, is occasionally