Page:Modern poets and poetry of Spain.djvu/302

256 appear made one after another, but at one blow, and as by enchantment. Thus all hail him as a perfect versifier and easy colloquist. Infinite are the matters he has introduced in his comedies, multiplied the characters sketched by his pen, innumerable the situations imagined, and undoubtedly there is due to him the well-founded ascription of a fertile genius. Originality, wit, easy dialogue, sonorous versification, an inexhaustible vein, would not be sufficient to form a good comic writer of manners without the criterion of observation, fit for filling up his pictures with exactness. This criterion also he possesses in a high degree."

High as is this encomium, the writer says of him further, that if it were decreed by Providence that a new race of barbarians should overrun Spain, destroying libraries and other depositaries of human knowledge, yet the name of Breton de los Herreros would survive the disaster, and some vestige of his comedies would remain. "Histories, books of learning, works of legislation, science, philosophy and politics are, no doubt, more profound than his comedies, though from their peculiar nature not so popular. Thus what we have said is to be understood as a means of distinguishing between writings which, that they may not perish in the course of ages, require studious men to adopt them for a test, and learned men to illustrate them by their commentaries, and those compositions that, to succeed in obtaining the honours of immortality, require only a people to recite and transmit them verbally from father to son. The name of Breton may become traditional in Spain, that of other celebrated writers will belong to history."

Breton has been elected a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and certainly one so highly gifted as he is in his department, is well deserving of every literary honour. The times are gone by when a writer of comedies could be all in