Villegas, Antonio de, poet, was born probably about the beginning of the sixteenth century. His poems were written before 1551, but were not printed till 1565—"Inventario de Obras, por Antonio de Villegas, Vezino de la Villa de Medina del Campo." Villegas refused allegiance to the Italianizing fashion, which in his time was making great innovations in the style and forms of the national literature. He maintained the doctrines and wrote in the measures of the old school. His shorter poems are the best, the longer being deficient in vigour and interest. It is said that the Prólogo addressed to the book has a certain resemblance to the well-known English stanzas, entitled The Soul's Errand.
Villegas, Estévan Manuel de, the most illustrious of the name, and one of the sweetest lyrical poets that Spain, or indeed any other country, has produced, was born of a noble but poor family at Nagera, or Naxera, a small town in Old Castile, in 1596. He received the earlier part of his education at court, but he was afterwards sent to the university of Salamanca to study the law. His taste for poetry was developed at a very early age. In his fifteenth year he translated Anacreon and several of the odes of Horace into Spanish verse, and also composed original poems in imitation of the ancient authors. Indeed, almost all his poetry was published when he was barely twenty-one. The first part of his volume consists of the poems already mentioned; the second comprises satires and elegies; idyls, in the Italian ottava rima; sonnets, written after the Petrarchan pattern; and Latinas, so called from the circumstance that they are written in the Roman measures. The whole were collected and published by the author himself, under the title of "Amatorias," at Naxera in 1617. The dedication to the king, Philip III., was probably written with a view to obtain some lucrative official employment, but in this Villegas was miserably disappointed. The royal favour, it seems, was not to be so purchased; and the suppliant poet, after several years' wearisome waiting, at length abandoned the muse, and compounded with his hopes by accepting an ill-paid fiscal appointment at his native town. The only poems he wrote after this were three satires, which, however, he did not venture to publish. Two of them were afterwards given to the world by Sedano, the third being too indelicate for publication. But he found leisure for writing a number of learned dissertations on ancient authors, besides part of a professional commentary on the Codex Theodosianus. In 1665 he published a translation of Boethius de Consolatione Philosophiæ—a work, probably undertaken as a consolation for his own sorrows, which, says Ticknor, "besides its excellent version of the poetical parts, is among the good specimens of Castilian prose." Villegas died a disappointed and unhappy man in 1669. In his gay and sprightly youth, when poesy, which was in him a real inspiration, carried him above the cares and sorrows of life, he had manifested somewhat more than was commendable of a self-confident and disdainful temper, speaking hard words even of the great Cervantes, whose misfortunes and old age (he was then almost on the brink of the grave) ought rather to have excited his reverence and sympathy. The ridiculous length which he allowed his presumption to hurry him in that thoughtless stage of his existence, can be nowhere better seen than on the title-page of the edition of his poems published by himself, where is a print of the rising sun, with the stars growing dim, accompanied by two explanatory mottoes—the first, "Sicut sol matutinus," and the other, "Me surgente, quid istæ?" But his faults, and they probably after all did not go very deep into his nature, are all forgotten in the pleasure which the reader derives from his inimitable verses. "We seem as we read them," remarks Ticknor, "to have the simple and joyous spirit of ancient festivity and love revived before us, with nothing, or almost nothing, of what renders the spirit offensive. . . . We close the volume, therefore, with sincere regret, that he who in his boyhood could write poetry so beautiful—poetry so imbued with the spirit of antiquity, and yet so full of the tenderness of modern feeling—so classically exact, and yet so fresh and natural—should have survived its publication above forty years, without finding an interval when the cares and disappointments of the world permitted him to return to the occupation that made his youth happy, and that preserved his name for a posterity of which, when he first lisped in numbers, he could hardly have had a serious thought." An excellent life of Villegas is prefixed to the edition of his works published at Madrid in 1774. It is said, on the authority of Guarinos, to have been written by Vicente de los Rios. The readers of German will also find an interesting notice of the poet and his works by Wieland, in the fifth volume of the Deutche Merkur, 1774.
Villegas, Francisco de, dramatist, lived in the seventeenth century. Villegas wrote in the decline of the national drama, and his eleven plays, though they are to be found in the huge collection entitled Comedias Nuevas Escogidas de los Mejores Autores. have been almost completely forgotten.
Villegas, Fernandez Ruiz de, Latin poet, was born of a noble family at Burgos about the beginning of the sixteenth century. He was destined by his parents for the church, and was already in possession of a benefice when his love for a lady of the name of Marianne de Lerma changed the entire purpose and course of his life. Having divested himself of the sacred office, he married his mistress, and thought himself as happy as it was possible for man to be in this sublunary world. But Marrianne after some time sickened and died, and left her husband inconsolable for her loss. He was now as miserable as he had before been happy. To relieve his thoughts somewhat of their intolerable sorrow, he betook himself again to the society of the muse, to whom he had aforetime confided the strangely alternating hopes and fears of a lover's heart. Such at least is what Villegas himself tells us in the numerous offspring he had by the muse, and let us trust that that celestial lady conspired with time to mitigate his deep distress. At any rate we find him singing the praises of the famous Aloisa Gigea of Toledo—a lady, as the reader may chance to know, who was deeply skilled in the ancient and oriental tongues, and whom a rascally Dutch professor, probably out of jealousy, grossly insulted in a beastly satire. Villegas, who was really a remarkable man, became governor of his native town, but he was latterly intrigued out of his post, and we can gather from some hints in his poems that he was sometimes in very great poverty. The year of his death is not known. He was taught in his boyhood by the celebrated Luiz Vives, and in after life enjoyed the friendship of William Budæus, Erasmus, and other eminent men. His poems, which are all in Latin, were left in MS., and were lost sight of till the beginning of last century, when they were discovered by Emmanuel Marti, dean of Alicante, in the library of the Count of Castlewi, at that time governor of Valentia. Marti intended to publish them, and with that view transcribed and corrected them, and wrote also an epistle dedicatory to the youth of Spain, and a preface, both of which have been printed along with his letters. His design, however, was not carried into execution till the year 1743, when these interesting poems appeared at Venice under the editorship of Andrew Lama—"Ferdinandi Ruizi Villegatis, Burgensis, quæ extant Opera," &c.
Villegas, Pero Fernandez de, poet of the sixteenth century. He was archdeacon of Burgos. His translation of the Inferno of Dante, accompanied with an elaborate commentary, was published in 1515. Some original poems are printed at the end of the volume (a folio, and now very scarce); one of them, on the "Vanity of Life," resembling the celebrated Coplas of Maurique. Pero had a brother of the name of Geronimo who was also a poetical translator, having turned into Spanish the sixth and tenth satires of Juvenal. The former was printed in the volume above mentioned, and the latter separately at Valladolid in 1519.—There is also a woman of the name of Ann Villegas, who occupies a modest place in the history of Spanish literature. She belonged to Medina del Campo in Old Castile. She enjoyed a great reputation for her knowledge of languages—was in fact one of the wonders of the day. Pierre de Moia has noticed her in his book De Illustr. Fem.—R. M., A.
VILLEHARDOUIN, Geoffroi de, one of the few mediæval barons whose fame is due to his writings. He was born about 1167 in a castle near Bar in Champagne, of which county he was in his thirtieth year the marshal. When Tybalt, count of Champagne and Brie, in 1199 resolved to go on a crusade to Jerusalem, Villehardouin was one of six deputies sent to Venico to prepare for the embarkation of the crusaders. The expedition started in 1202, and in the subsequent proceedings Geoffroi was often put forward as spokesman and ambassador by his countrymen. In this way he conducted negotiations with both Isaac and Alexis Comnenus. After the capture of Constantinople in 1204, Baldwin the Latin emperor made Villehardouin marshal of Roumania. The marquis of Montferrat, his first leader to the crusades, estimated his services at the high price of a town and its dependencies in Thessaly, where he gave him
