enth century he wrote in both Portuguese and
Castilian, though better in the former tongue. He was
close to the people in his thinking and writing page xix
and some of the songs contained in his plays reproduce the
truest popular savor.

The intimate connection between Spain and Italy during the
period when the armies of the Emperor Charles V (Charles I
of Spain: reigned 1516-1555) were overrunning the latter
country gave a new stimulus to the imitation of Italian
meters and poets which we have seen existed in a premature
state since the reign of John II. The man who first
achieved real success in the hendecasyllable, combined in
sonnets, octaves, _terza rima_ and blank verse, was Juan
BOSCAN ALMOGAVER (1490?-1542), a Catalan of wealth and
culture. Boscan was handicapped by writing in a tongue
not native to him and by the constant holding of foreign
models before his eyes, and he was not a man of genius;
yet his verse kept to a loftier ideal than had appeared
for a long time and his effort to lift Castilian poetry
from the slough of convention into which it had fallen was
successful. During the rest of the century the impulse
given by Boscan divided Spanish lyrists into two opposing
hosts, the Italianates and those who clung to the native
meters (stanzas of short, chiefly octosyllabic, lines, for
the _arte mayor_ had sunk by its own weight).

The first and greatest of Boscan's disciples was his close
friend GARCILASO DE LA VEGA (1503-1536) who far surpassed
his master. He was a scion of a most noble family, a
favorite of the emperor, and his adventurous career,
passed mostly in Italy, ended in a soldier's death. His
poems, however (_eglogas, canciones_, sonnets, etc.),
take us from real life into the sentimental world of the
Arcadian pastoral. Shepherds discourse of their unrequited
loves and mourn amid surroundings of an idealized Nature.
page xx
The pure diction, the Vergilian flavor, the classic finish
of these poems made them favorites in Spain from the
first, and their author has always been regarded as a
master.

With Garcilaso begins the golden age of Spanish poetry and
of Spanish literature in general, which may be said to
close in 1681 with the death of Calderon. It was a period
of external greatness, of conquest both in Europe and
beyond the Atlantic, but it contained the germs of future
decay. The strength of the nation wa