The chief talent of Father Isla was in satire, and the great service he performed for his country was that of driving from its respectable churches the low and vulgar style of preaching with which they had long been infested;--a work which the “Friar Gerund” achieved almost as completely as the “Don Quixote” did that of destroying the insane passion for books of chivalry which prevailed in the seventeenth century.
But, meanwhile, other attempts were making in other directions to revive the literature of the country; some by restoring a taste for the old national poetry, some by attempting to accommodate every thing to the French doctrines of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, and some by an ill-defined and often, perhaps, unconscious struggle to unite the two opinions, and to form a school whose character should be unlike that of either and yet in advance of both.
In the direction of the earlier national poetry little was done by original efforts, but something was attempted in other ways. Huerta, a fierce, but inconsistent, adversary of the French innovations, printed, in 1778, a volume of poems almost entirely in the old manner; but it was too much marked with the bad taste of the preceding century to enjoy even a temporary success, and its author, therefore, could boast of no follower of any note in a path which was constantly less and less trodden.[339]
[339] “Poesías de Don Vicente Garcia de la Huerta,” Madrid, 1778, 12mo, and a second edition, 1786. “La Perromachia,” a mock-heroic on the loves and quarrels of sundry dogs, by Francisco Nieto Molina, (Madrid, 1765, 12mo,) is too poor to deserve notice, though it is an attempt to give greater currency to the earlier national verse,--the _redondillas_.
On the other hand, more was done with effect to recall the memory of the old masters themselves. Lopez de Sedano, between 1768 and 1778, published his “Spanish Parnassus,” in nine volumes; a work which, though ill digested and not always showing good taste in its selections and criticisms, is still a rich mine of the poetry of the country in its best days, and contains important materials for the history of Spanish literature from the period of Boscan and Garcilasso.[340] Sanchez went further back, and in 1779 offered, to his countrymen, for the first time, the greater legendary treasures of their heroic ages, beginning with the noble old poem of the Cid, but unhappily leaving incomplete a task for which he had proved himself so well fitted by his learning and zeal, if not by his acuteness.[341] And finally, Sarmiento, a friend of Feyjoó, and one of his ablest public defenders, undertook an elaborate history of Spanish poetry, which contains important discussions relating to the period embraced by the inquiries of Sanchez, but which was broken off by the death of its venerable author in 1770, and remained unpublished till five years later.[342] These three works, though they excited too little attention at first, were still works of importance, and have served as the foundation for a better state of things since.