[p. i]
HISTORY
OF
SPANISH LITERATURE.
VOL. I.
[p. iii]
HISTORY
OF
SPANISH LITERATURE.
BY
GEORGE TICKNOR.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOLUME I.
NEW YORK:
HARPER AND BROTHERS, 82 CLIFF STREET
M DCCC XLIX.
[p. iv]
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by
George Ticknor,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
[p. v]
PREFACE.
In the year eighteenhundred and eighteen I travelled through a large part of Spain, andspent several months in Madrid. My object was to increase a veryimperfect knowledge of the language and literature of the country,and to purchase Spanish books, always so rare in the great book-martsof the rest of Europe. In some respects, the time of my visit wasfavorable to the purposes for which I made it; in others, it was not.Such books as I wanted were then, it is true, less valued in Spain thanthey are now, but it was chiefly because the country was in a depressedand unnatural state; and, if its men of letters were more than commonlyat leisure to gratify the curiosity of a stranger, their number hadbeen materially diminished by political persecution, and intercoursewith them was difficult because they had so little connection with eachother, and were so much shut out from the world around them.
It was, in fact, one of the darkest periods ofthe reign of Ferdinand the Seventh, when the desponding seemed tothink that the eclipse was not only total,[p. vi] but “beyond all hope of day.” The absolutepower of the monarch had been as yet nowhere publicly questioned; andhis government, which had revived the Inquisition and was not wantingin its spirit, had, from the first, silenced the press, and, whereverits influence extended, now threatened the extinction of all generousculture. Hardly four years had elapsed since the old order of thingshad been restored at Madrid, and already most of the leading men ofletters, whose home was naturally in the capital, were in prison orin exile. Melendez Valdes, the first Spanish poet of the age, hadjust died in misery on the unfriendly soil of France. Quintana, inmany respects the heir to his honors, was confined in the fortress ofPamplona. Martinez de la Rosa, who has since been one of the leaders ofthe nation as well as of its literature, was shut up in Peñon on thecoast of Barbary. M