III.
JUAN MELENDEZ VALDES.
For a hundred years after the time of Calderon de la Barca, who died in 1687, there appeared in Spain no writer of sufficient merit to be classed among those eminent characters, who had done so much honour to Spanish literature in the seventeenth century. Verses were published in sufficient abundance, which found readers and even admirers, merely from the necessity the public felt of having something to read and to admire, as of the fashion of the day. But they were written with a perversion of taste and a deficiency of talent, which was truly astonishing, in the successors of such authors, as had immediately preceded them.
This depression of literature, however, could not be expected to continue long, among a people of such imaginative and deep passioned character as the Spanish, whose native genius was by far too buoyant, to be affected for any length of time by inferior models, even under dynastic influences. Accordingly, towards the end of the eighteenth century, it might have become apparent to an attentive observer, that another order of writers was about to be called forth, and that the nation was prepared to welcome the advent of true
