Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/47

 Rh the sonnet is generally attributed, was really the author. All that can be said is that it is in his manner, and that the reference to the heretics and Lutherans is Gongora all over; if not his it comes from his school, and shows the feeling existing in that quarter towards Cervantes and his work.

In another piece, still more characteristic, he makes an attack on Cervantes which has never been noticed, so far as I am aware. In the ballad beginning "Castillo de San Cervantes" he taunts the old castle on the Tagus, already referred to, with being no longer what it was in the days of its youth when it did such gallant service against the Moors, compares its crumbling battlements to an old man's teeth, and bids it look down and see in the stream below how age has changed it. Depping, who inserts the ballad in his "Romancero," admits that the idea is poetical, but confesses he cannot see the drift of the poet, who seems to him to be here rather a preacher than a poet, and no doubt others have shared his perplexity. It was evidently a recognized gibe to compare Cervantes to the ruined castle that bore his name; Avellaneda, in the scurrilous preface to his continuation of "Don Quixote," jeers at him in precisely the same strain as the ballad, for having grown as old, and being as much the worse for time as the castle of San Cervantes. Gongora, it may be observed, had a special gift of writing pretty, innocent-looking verses charged with venom. Who would take the lines to a mountain brook, beginning—

as guileless apparently as a lyrical ballad of Wordsworth's, to be in reality a bitter satire on the unlucky upstart, Rodrigo Calderon?

Another reason for the enmity of Gongora and his clique to Cervantes may well have been that their arch-enemy Quevedo was a friend of his. Cervantes, indeed, expressly declares his esteem for Quevedo as "the scourge of silly poets." It is a pity that we know so little of the relations of these two men to one another. Quevedo nowhere mentions Cervantes personally, though he shows himself to have been an appreciative reader of "Don Quixote," and Cervantes only twice mentions