y unintelligible
for the inversions and strained metaphors with which they
are overloaded.

His influence was enormous. Gongorism, or _culteranismo_,
as it was called at the time, swept the minor poets
with it, and even those who fought the movement most
vigorously, like Lope and Quevedo, were not wholly free
from the contagion. The second generation of dramatists
was strongly affected. Yet there are few lyric poets worth
mentioning among Gongora's disciples for the reason that
such a pernicious system meant certain ruin to those who
lacked the master's talent. The most important names are
the Count of Villamediana (1580-1622), a satirist whose
sharp tongue caused his assassination, and Paravicino y
Arteaga (1580-1633), a court preacher.

Obviously, such an innovation could not pass without
opposition from clear-sighted men. LOPE DE VEGA
(1562-1635) attacked it whenever opportunity offered, and
his verse seldom shows signs of corruption. It page xxv
is impossible to consider the master-dramatist at length
here. He wrote over 300 sonnets, many excellent eclogues,
epistles, and, in more popular styles, glosses,
_letrillas, villancicos, romances_, etc. Lope more than
any other poet of his time kept his ear close to the
people, and his light poems are full of the delicious
breath of the country.

The other principal opponent of Gongorism was Francisco
GOMEZ DE QUEVEDO Y VILLEGAS (1580-1645), whose wit and
independence made him formidable. In 1631 he published
the poems of Luis de Leon and Francisco de la Torre as a
protest against the baleful mannerism in vogue. But he
himself adopted a hardly less disagreeable style, called
conceptism, which is supposed to have been invented by
Alonso de Ledesma (1552-1623). It consists in a strained
search for unusual thoughts which entails forced
paradoxes, antitheses and epigrams. This system, combined
with local allusions, double meanings and current slang,
in which Quevedo delighted, makes his poems often
extremely difficult of comprehension. His _romances de
jaques_, written in thieves' jargon, are famous in Spain.
Quevedo wrote too much and carelessly and tried to cover
too many fields, but at his best his caustic wit and
fearless vigor place him high.

There were not lacking poets who kept themselves free from
taint of _culteranismo_, though they did not join in
the fight against it. The brothers Argensola (LUPERCIO
LEONARDO DE ARGENSOLA, 1559-1613, BAR