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68 had previously prevailed. The applauses extended beyond the kingdom, and found especially in Italy the admiration repeated, as well as in France and England, where several of the poems are said to have been imitated.

Great as was his success in literature, it was not enough provision for his daily needs, notwithstanding the help of his professorship; and Melendez accordingly applied for and obtained an office as a local judge at Zaragoza, of which he took possession in September 1789. The duties of this office were too onerous to admit of much study; but he was soon removed, in 1791, to the chancery of Valladolid, where he had more leisure, and where he remained till 1797, when he was appointed Fiscal of the Supreme Court at Madrid. During this time he wrote apparently little; but he prepared, and in 1797 published, another edition of his works with two additional volumes, enriched with many new poems, in which he "had elevated his genius to the height of his age;"—"descriptive passages of a superior order, elegies powerful and pathetic, odes grand and elevated, philosophic and moral discourses and epistles, in which he took alternately the tone of Pindar, of Homer, of Thomson, and of Pope, and drew from the Spanish lyre accents she had not previously learned."

But notwithstanding the great merit of many of these poems, the biographer of Melendez had it to confess that this publication was not so favourably received as the first had been; and attempts to account for it partly by the circumstances of the times, and partly by what was new not being on the whole so finished and well-sustained in interest as his former poems. Some of them also met with decided disfavour; especially one, 'The Fall of Lucifer,' which showed that his genius was not of the severer cast calculated for graver and higher subjects allied to the epic, any more than