Τ ESSAY IT may well seem remarkable, to one who considers the great influence of the poet Gongora on the poetry and polite literature of his own country, that hitherto there should have been no attempt to bring his poems more immediately to the test of English criticism by translation. The influence of Alexander Pope on our versifiers of the last century was not more prevalent, nor sustained for a longer period, than the influence of Lewis Gongora on the courtly wits of Spain. True it is in the meantime, that his name has been cast out as evil by critics on both shores of the Atlantic, and on both frontiers of the Pyrenees, associated with the Euphuists and "fantastical Spaniards" whom Shakspeare has personified in his Osric and Armado, and all those artificers of affected phraseology, who "spin the thread of their verbosity finer than the staple of their argument." |