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334 In the following volumes he continues the course now so markedly his own as a national poet. He avowedly chooses, as becoming him in that character, subjects taken from the traditions and legends current in Spain, and clothing them in glowing language reproduces them to his delighted readers as the dreams and remembrances of their youth. He is especially partial to the tales connected with the Moorish wars, and in so doing, with great poetic effect, always represents the Moors in the most favourable light. Thus he throughout makes them worthy rivals of the Christians, and thereby renders greater the merit of the conquerors. The richness of his diction is truly extraordinary, often so as to make us lose sight of the paucity of ideas contained in his poems, and that those again are too much the same repeated constantly over.

If it was a wonderful and admirable triumph for one so young to achieve by one bound the unqualified commendations of his countrymen, and to sustain the success then acquired by subsequent efforts, we have still to regret that there were evils attending that precocity to prevent his attaining apparently the highest excellence. Perhaps there is no one we can point out as so truly exemplifying the maxim "poeta nascitur." He was truly born a poet; and though he often writes showing that he had been reading Calderon or some other of the elder writers of Spain, or even some of the French poets, yet he always gives the colouring of his own mind to those imitations so as to make them his own. This often again leads him to a mannerism and repetition of himself; but notwithstanding these faults or occasional errors of carelessness, his compositions always remain uniformly and irresistibly captivating.

Besides his poems, Zorrilla has published upwards of twenty dramatic pieces, some of which have been repeatedly produced