428 COSMOS. 



devoid of animation, but Ercilla' s style is not smooth or easj, 

 while it is overloaded with proper names, and is devoid of 

 all trace of poetic enthusiasm.* 



This enthusiastic poetic inspiration is to be traced, how- 

 ever, in many strophes of the Romancero Caballeresco ; f in 



* A predilection for the old literature of Spain, and for the enchanting 

 region in which the Araucana of Alonso de Ercilla y Zufliga was com- 

 posed, has led me to read through the whole of this poem (which, unfortu- 

 nately, comprises 42,000 verses) on two occasions, once in Peru, and 

 again recently in Paris, when, by the kindness of a learned traveller, M. 

 Ternaux Compans, I received, for the purpose of comparing it with Ercilla, 

 a very scarce book, printed in 1596 at Lima, and containing the nineteen 

 cantos of the Arauco domado (compuesto por el Licenciado Pedro de 

 O^a natural de los Infantes de Engol en Chile). Of the epic poem of 

 Ercilla, which Voltaire regarded as an Iliad, and Sismondi as a news- 

 paper in rhyme, the first fifteen cantos were composed between 1555 

 and 1563, and were published in 1569; the later cantos were first 

 printed in 1590, only six years before the wretched poem of Pedro de 

 Ofta, which bears the same title as one of the master-works of Lope de 

 Vega, in which the Cacique Caupolican is also the principal personage. 

 Ercilla is unaffected and true-hearted, especially in those parts of his 

 composition which he wrote in the field, mostly on the bark of trees 

 and the skins of animals, for want of paper. The description of his 

 poverty, and of the ingratitude which he like others experienced at the 

 court of King Philip, is extremely touching, pai'ticularly at the close 

 of the 37th canto : 



" Climas pase, mude constelaciones, 

 Golfos innavegables navegando, 

 Estendiendo Seftor, vuestra corona 

 Hasta casi la austral frigida zona." 



"The flower of my life is past; led by a late-earned experience I will 

 renounce earthly things, weep, and no longer sing." The natural 

 descriptions cf the garden of the sorcerer, of the tempest raised by 

 Eponamon, and the delineation of the ocean, (P. i. pp. 80, 135, and 173; 

 P. ii. pp. 130 and 161, in the edition of 1733,) are wholly devoid of life 

 and animation. Geographical registers of words are accumulated in 

 such a manner that, in canto xxvii., twenty-seven proper names follow 

 each other in a single stanza of eight lines. Part ii. of the Araucana is 

 uot by Ercilla, but is a continuation, in twenty cantos, by Diego de 

 Santistevan Osorio, appended to the thirty-seven cantos of Ercilla. 



f See in Romancero de Romances cdballerescos e historicos ordenado, 

 por D. Augustin Duran, P. i. p. 189, and P. ii. p. 237, the fine 

 strophes commencing 1 ba dedinando el diaSu curso y ligeras horaa, 

 aud those on the flight of King Rodrigo, beginning 

 " Cuando las pintados ave* 

 Mudas estdn, y la tierra 

 A tenta evcucha los rio" 



