and elegiac sonnets, and several of his longer compositions. Indeed the varied power, shewn in treating of so many widely different subjects, appears to the present writer one of the principal charms of Gongora's poetry.

Our poet, às Le Sage correctly states it, wished to have nothing of his writing printed, while he lived, but contented himself with reading what he wrote to his friends. In dealing with the literary remains of a man, who can scarcely be said to have published anything, selection is not only expedient, but becomes a duty. There are many trifles of a light satirical cast, one very much like another, which he may have written to divert a fit of spleen, or which may have served for temporary amusement to those to whom they were addressed, but were not worth preserving. As Hurd said of Cowley, "What he wrote is so good, or so bad, that in all reason a separation should be made." And it would be a wrong to the memory of a man, who has left so many proofs of his having been guided by religious feeling and a sense of moral beauty, to reproduce what the zeal of some of his friends may have too fondly preserved, but what we can hardly doubt that his own deliberate judgment would have suppressed.

In what we have selected and translated, we wish we could hope that we had succeeded half as well as Professor Longfellow in his noble version of the solemn old "Couplets of Manrique;" or as the Dean of Westminster in his tasteful critical and poetical

Essay on Calderon. But the reader will remember what the author of Don Quixote says of like producing like. We must leave our light labour in the hands of an indulgent public, with the brave resolution of the gallant Ensign Bermudez, when he had set his wits upon a cast in a stage-play: "I have done the best I could; let Fortune take it as she will: Yo he hecho lo que he podido; Fortuna lo que ha querido."

FOR the Engraved Portrait of the poet Gongora, which is prefixed to this volume, the work is much indebted to Henry Reeve, Esq., a name well known in literary circles; by whose permission it has been taken from a valuable picture in his possession, the exact counterpart of the painting by Velazquez in the Madrid Gallery. It was no uncommon thing for great portrait-painters in the age of Velazquez to reproduce, or further to multiply their most successful portraits of remarkable persons; and there is sufficient reason to suppose that this, equally with the Madrid picture, is from the master's hand. Sedano has an engraved likeness taken from a painting in the possession of Don Eugenio de Llaguna y Amirola, the author of the History of Spanish Architects, which, he says, appeared to be an old copy of the original by Velazquez.*

The later history of Mr. Reeve's picture is this. It was sold at a public sale about twenty years ago as a portrait of Count Gondomar, the name of the old statist being probably more familiar to the salesman * Parnaso Español, vol. ix. vii.

than that of the poet. It was formerly in the collection of Mr. Ottley, the Author of the "History of Engraving," and to him it is believed to have come from Sir William Hamilton's collection, which was formed at Naples. It is not impossible, that it may have been first carried from Spain into Italy by some Spanish admirer of Gongora, who was concerned with the Viceregal Government of Naples in the time of Philip III. or IV.