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NOT more unquestioned is Cervantes’ claim to be the first of Spanish humorists than that of Quevedo to be the second. Among his own countrymen the title, which is generally the more disputable, has been by a singular consensus of opinion assigned to Quevedo. The author of Don Quixote apart, who is with the Immortals, there is no greater name among the writers of Spain than that of the author of The Visions, of Don Pablo, of innumerable poems, pamphlets, satires, pieces of wit, and works serious, moral, sportive, and fanciful. In that Golden Age, prolific of authors, the hundred years between the birth of Cervantes and the prime of Calderon, there was no genius so fruitful in every kind of intellectual product. Poet, politician, humorist, satirist, theologian, moralist, historian, novelist—Quevedo stands out a prodigy of learning, wit, and quick and various invention, even among the crowd of gifted writers who made that period famous in letters. He has been called the Spanish Juvenal—the Spanish Ovid—the Spanish Lucian. He is something of all these, and yet is unlike any of them. He wrote lyrics with the grace, simplicity, and ease of Horace. He is as prodigal of humour as Rabelais, whom he resembles also in his unfastidiousness, his obscurity, and his extravagance. He has been likened to our English Swift, to whom he is akin in the quality of his mordant wit, and almost approaches in his anti-humanity; but he is lacking in the creative force of the author of Gulliver. Not unlike Swift was Quevedo in fortune as in genius, for it was disappointed ambition which wore out his heart and drove him to satire, to visions, and assaults on human folly and vice.

From his earliest years Quevedo was marked for distinction. When scarcely more than twenty-three he corresponded with the great scholars of Germany and the Low Countries, the great Lipsius hailing him as magnum decus Hispanorum, and in complimentary epistles urging him to undertake the vindication of Homer. If we may believe the contemporary records, Quevedo had by this time acquired all profane knowledge and human learning. He was versed in all the languages, even Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic. He began to write early, and continued to write during the whole of his busy and turbulent life, with an industry, energy, and fecundity which made him the wonder of his age. The catalogue of his works embraces every department of authorship, and there appears to be no species of composition, from an exhortation to a holy life to the more than ribald canzonet, which he did not attempt. The gayest themes were as much to his mind as the gravest studies, and from Paul the Apostle he could pass at will to Paul the Sharper, with no apparent effort of wit or strain of conscience. Some of his works have been lost, but enough remains to testify to the astonishing vigour, exuberance, and versatility of his genius. There are religious treatises and biographies of saints, a Defence of the Faith, and a homily on the sacred cradle and sepulchre. There is a metrical translation of Epictetus, and another of (the false) Phocylides. There is a life of Marcus Brutus. There are letters to kings and statesmen, and tracts on the currency. There are satires in verse and lampoons in prose. There are poems, odes, ballads, and sonnets innumerable. Even the drama he did not leave unattempted, though his comedies have perished, together with many other works, including Considerations on the New Testament and a Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul. Finally, there is the picaresque novel here presented to the English reader under the title of Don Pablo de Segovia, or Paul the Sharper.

Francisco de Quevedo, or, to give him his full title, Francisco de Gomez de Quevedo Villegas, was born at Madrid on the 26th of September, 1580. He was thus thirty-three years younger than Cervantes, eighteen years younger than Lope de Vega, and some twenty years older than Calderon. His father had been a servant to the Emperor Charles V., and his mother was a lady in attendance upon Philip II.’s fourth wife, Anne of Austria. The family of Quevedo drew its source from the mountains of Old Castile, near Burgos. This was a circumstance of which every good Spaniard of the age was proud, as proving that he was descended from the pure Gothic race, who maintained their hold of the soil even after the Moorish invasion, and therefore was an old Christian, of blood unmixed with Moor or Jew. From his parents’ position the young Francisco must have been early trained in the life of the Court and brought into contact with those who dispensed the power and patronage of the king. He was educated at the University of Alcalá de Henares, then in the height of its fame. At fifteen he graduated in theology, and soon afterwards acquired great distinction for his attainments in the civil and common law and in the learned languages. That he was early distinguished as a scholar is proved by his correspondence with Lipsius and other foreign men of learning, by whom he was addressed as an equal. For some time, however, Quevedo seems to have lived the usual life of a gay cavalier of the Court, indulging, as he confesses himself, in the pleasures of his age and the time, and taking part in those adventures which formed matter for his lighter works. At twenty-three he was already a poet distinguished enough to be included in Espinosa’s Flores de Poetas Ilustres (1603). A few years afterwards was published the first collection of his prose satires, which are better known to the world as Visions—the Zahurdas de Pluton (Pigstyes of Pluto), with a dedication to the Conde de Lemos—a Mæcenas of the period, to whom afterwards Cervantes dedicated the second part of his Don Quixote. The pieces which are known as Visions are among the most characteristic and original, as they have been the most popular, of all Quevedo’s works. They bear such titles as El Sueño de las Calaveras (The Dream of Skulls); El Alguacil Alguacilado (The Catchpole Caught); Visita de los Chistes (Visitation of the Jests); El Mundo por de Dentro (The World Inside Out); El Entremetido, la Dueña, y el Soplon (The Intermeddler, the Duenna, and the Informer); and (the authorship of which is more doubtful) La Casa de los Locos de Amor (The House of the Love-Madmen). These, which were published at various times, are satires of a kind then new to the world, or known only in the works of Lucian; audacious and somewhat extravagant of conception; abounding in wit, in fancy, and in humour; various in character and in design, but all intended to ridicule or censure some reigning folly or vice or abuse. They have been called Visions because most of them are cast in the form of dreams, in which the author takes us into the world below, among the Devil and his attendants, who are introduced with many lively touches of wit and strokes of humour. It is an invention which has been in favour with poets and satirists of all time, from Lucian to Dante, and from Dante to Lord Byron.

By these Visions (by himself never so called collectively) the name of Quevedo has been chiefly made known out of Spain. They are among the most characteristic of his works, in which his audacious humour and impetuous fancy found full exercise and a congenial element. They have been often translated into the various European languages, and were much read and quoted in the commerce of letters. Besides these, the Visions proper, which are serious satires levelled at the abuses and the evils of the times, there were numerous other squibs, jests, and pasquinades, of less solid substance or of lower aim, in rebuke of the fashionable follies or the vulgar tastes, such as El Cuento de los Cuentos (The Tale of Tales), which is levelled at the excessive use of proverbs; El Caballero de la Tenaza (The Knight of the Forceps), being the apology of a miser for himself; La Perinola (The Teetotum), which is a personal attack on the fussy and frivolous Perez de Montalvan, one of Quevedo’s favourite butts. There are numerous others, of which the very titles are so coarse as not to be fit for mention—ephemeral and obscure, which have died with the occasions which gave them birth.

That at least before 1613 Quevedo was esteemed, by those best capable of judging, as among the best wits of the time, appears from the very flattering notice of him which is contained in Cervantes’ Viage del Parnaso (Voyage to Parnassus). He is there called Apollo’s son—son of the Muse Calliope; and his aid is declared to be absolutely necessary in the war which the god of poetry is about to wage with the bad poets. It is true that Cervantes was in the habit of praising almost everybody, but from the warmth of the terms used, and from other indications in Quevedo’s own works, we may infer that the two greatest wits of the period had, as great wits rarely have, a just appreciation of each other. Lope de Vega also, who was of a different order of genius, as well of a nature dissimilar, ever suspicious of a rival and jealous of the applause given to another, could bring himself to speak of Quevedo in his Laurel de Apolo as prince of the lyric poets, the Juvenal of Spanish verse, who might rival Pindar and replace Apollo himself if the god were to fail.

But before Quevedo had made his name in letters he was destined to earn distinction in a public career, which afforded him a rare opportunity for displaying the versatility of his talents and the soundness of his judgment. Debarred from the profession of arms by his physical infirmity—he was lame of both feet from his birth—he was driven to seek a career in civil employment. An adventure which befell him at Madrid served to fix his destiny. Being in a church at Madrid during the Holy Week, he saw a gallant of the Court offer a gross insult to a modest woman. He interfered to protect her, swords were drawn, and Quevedo slew the aggressor. The slain man being discovered to be a person of rank, nearly related to those who had power at Court, Quevedo was forced to fly the country, taking refuge in Sicily, then a dependency of Spain. The governor or viceroy of the island was Don Pedro Tellez Giron, Duke of Osuna, a powerful grandee, of whom it was said that nature made him a very little gentleman and his deeds a very great lord; a man of mark in the civil and military transactions of Philip III. Quevedo was made his secretary by the Duke, and employed in many delicate and important affairs of state, in all of which he is declared to have proved, on the Duke’s own testimony, his prudence, courage, and ability. The Duke of Osuna was transferred, in 1615, from the government of Sicily to that of Naples, and thither he was followed by Quevedo, who was made Minister of Finance. In the interval between his employment in Sicily and his higher office at Naples, Quevedo was despatched to Madrid on a confidential mission in connection with the revenues of the island, and was able to commend himself so greatly to the authorities that the affair of the fatal duel was condoned and a pension of four hundred ducats bestowed on him. At Naples Quevedo discharged his duties of financial secretary with great ability and conspicuous success, so that we are told that, while he reduced the burdens of the people, he augmented the revenues of the State. During the years following he seems to have been employed in various high and secret diplomatic businesses in connection with the policy of the ambitious and turbulent Duke, his master, being entrusted with the duties of a plenipotentiary at Rome and at Venice, and managing them, according to the contemporary historians, with much address and discretion. In the course of his political adventures Quevedo was involved, in 1617, in that strange affair among conspiracies which has since been so great a puzzle to historians, the so-called Conjuracion de Venise, which has furnished St. Real with a subject for his history, and Otway with characters and a plot for his tragedy. Whether there really was, on the part of the Spanish Viceroy of Naples, an attempt to overthrow the government of the Venetian Republic, or whether, as later historians are inclined to believe, the whole business was planned by the agents of the Venetian Senate to enable them to reach certain of their political enemies, is a question which is still under controversy—a controversy in which we are not concerned to take a part. Certain it is that Quevedo contrived, as an agent of Spain, to make himself a person the most ungrateful to the Republic, which pursued him, for some months afterwards, with a fury of hate and bitterness of malice, which, though flattering to his character of political intriguant, seem irreconcilable with the theory of his innocence. He even ran a narrow risk of losing his life when on a visit, apparently secret and unauthorized, to Venice. He was chased by the officers of justice, and only escaped, we are told, through the completeness of his disguise, being habited in the rags of a beggar, and his perfect command of the Venetian dialect. He had the honour of being afterwards burnt in effigy, a compliment he returned by pouring a stream of invective on Venice and her government out of the resources of his abundant rhetoric. Venice he called the lumber-house of the world—the toll-booth of princes—a republic such as cannot be credited and cannot be forgotten—greater than it is fitting for her to be, and less than she gives herself out to be; powerful in treaties, and feeble in power; sumptuous in arsenals, profuse in ships; terrible to those who fear the hulks of a fleet, where fleet is none—a dominion which exposes the hollowness of many fears. It is a state the more prone to dissensions of all that exist, more hurtful to her friends than to her enemies, whose embrace is a peaceful war,—with a good deal else, in a tone which savours of very bitter recollections.

Quevedo had now arrived at the zenith of his fame and fortunes. In 1617 he was in Madrid, where he was received with great honour by the King, Philip III., and his minister, the all-powerful Duke of Lerma. He was advanced to the much-coveted distinction of a Knight of the Order of Santiago. The highest posts seemed to be awaiting him at home, through favour of the feeble and besotted King, then under the influence of a corrupt and incapable favourite, who was himself ruled by his minion, Don Rodrigo Calderon. The ambition of Quevedo, as all his serious works clearly show, was rather for power as a man of affairs than for fame as a man of letters. But now he was destined to encounter a sudden change of fortune. The death of Philip III. brought to the throne, in 1621, his son, Philip IV., then a lad of seventeen, under the dominion of his gentleman of the bedchamber, known to history as the Count-Duke Olivares. All the principal officers of the late administration were dismissed in disgrace. Even the powerful and able Duke of Osuna, whose brilliant and successful rule in Naples had shed so much lustre on the reign of the feeble Philip III., was recalled from his post. His ministers and secretaries were involved in his fate. Quevedo was sentenced to exile from Court, and confined to his patrimonial village of La Torre de Juan Abad, where he was kept in a kind of imprisonment for more than three years. To a man of his fervid temperament and aspiring hopes this was a punishment worse than death, which seems for ever after to have embittered his soul and soured his temper. Writing to the President of Castile to complain of his miserable state and the treatment to which he was subjected, he tells him that he had seen many men condemned to death, but no one condemned to make away with himself. He was ultimately allowed to go free without being told of what charge there had been against him or any reason given for his detention. Henceforth Quevedo seems to have abandoned all hopes of preferment at Court, exhibiting more philosophy and more steadfastness in his resolve to abstain from further thoughts of political life than other men of letters have shown, in a similar turn of fate, who have been endowed with the same taste for the delights of office. He seems to have recovered some portion of the royal favour. He was offered various high posts in the State, among others the embassy to Genoa, but he refused them, and would only accept the honorary title of King’s Secretary. He did not wholly exclude himself from politics, however, but, like Swift, continued to vex himself with public affairs, showing by his sensibility to the follies and errors of statesmen where his heart lay, and what was the secret of the saeva indignatio by which he was tortured. He was free with his pen in condemnation of crying abuses and defects in the administration. He was prolific of letters, pamphlets, and satires in prose and verse, all written with a boldness and freedom to which the age was unaccustomed, which brought their author frequently into trouble. He assailed a scheme for the debasement of the coinage with a courage and a power of wit and sarcasm such as were not excelled even by the famous Drapier, on the same theme, a hundred years later. He exposed certain abuses in the distribution of the patronage of the military order of Santiago with a fearlessness which cost him another period of banishment from Court. He wrote letters to the King of France (Louis XIII.) and others, more or less directly impugning the conduct of affairs then under the worthless favourite, the Count-Duke of Olivares.

In 1634 Quevedo, being in his fifty-fourth year, married—to the surprise, and somewhat to the amusement, of his friends. His way of life hitherto had scarcely been such as to proclaim his confidence in the married state; and a letter which he had written to his friend, the widowed Duchess of Lerma, on the qualities required of a wife, had seemed to set his standard of taste so high as to condemn him to celibacy. His wife died soon after their marriage, leaving Quevedo with fresh troubles, arising out of his satirical humour, or rather from his reputation for satire. He had betaken himself, after his wife’s death, to his country retreat at Torre de Juan Abad to seek consolation in literature; and this was probably his busiest period of production. He wrote a life of Marcus Brutus, of which the scarcely concealed intention was to point to the Cæsar who then tyrannized over Spain. He aimed satires in verse, after the classical model, at the reigning favourite. He wrote the Politica de Dios y Gobierno de Cristo (Policy of God and Government of Christ), which, under the guise of a religious work, was a biting satire on the King and the Count-Duke. He wrote other works, some of which have perished, distinguished by elegance of style and energy of expression, none of them deserving of more than a passing mention, and all belonging rather to the political history than to the literature of Spain. To this period also, probably, are to be referred the greater part of those satirical works, under the name of Visions, which have chiefly contributed to make the name of Quevedo known to the nations outside of Spain—those bitter, half-humorous, half-serious, and all-fantastical inventions, such as The Dream of Skulls and The World Inside Out.

In 1639, when it might have seemed to him that Fortune had already done her worst to plague him, and he had no more either to hope or fear from kings or ministers, there happened to Quevedo the worst of all the calamities which marked his busy and troubled life. A satirical sonnet was found under the King’s napkin at supper, which contained violent reflections on the Government of the Count-Duke Olivares. Quevedo was believed to be the author, and, without any inquiry or trial, he was seized at dead of night, in the Duke of Medina Celi’s palace, and hurried off to a dungeon under the cells of the Royal Convent of San Marcos at Leon. Here he was kept in strict confinement for nearly four years, in spite of a pitiful appeal to Olivares, in which, while protesting his innocence of the offence imputed to him, Quevedo wrote: No clemency can add many years to my life; no rigour can take many away. He was asked to declare which of the many satires there were going about were his and which were not, but he returned a proud and disdainful answer. The real author of the lampoon for which Quevedo was punished was discovered soon after, but this made little or no difference in the treatment to which he was subjected. In vain did he entreat the Count-Duke for justice and relief. He pleaded that he was blind of the left eye, crippled, and afflicted with ulcers, declaring that he sought not liberty but change of regimen and of prison, and this change, the gospel says, Christ granted to a great number of devils who besought it of Him. In vain were all these pleas. They were probably glad to be able to silence, on any pretext, that bold and biting tongue, which had already done so much to proclaim to posterity the iniquities of the Government. It was not until after the fall of the Count-Duke himself, amidst the rejoicings of the whole nation, that Quevedo was restored to liberty. But his four years’ imprisonment, during part of which time he had been treated, as he complains, like a wild beast shut up alone without human intercourse, had ruined his health and broken his spirits. His estate had been sequestrated, and he was never able to recover more than a small part of it, so that poverty was added, for the first time in his life, to his other trials. Worn out by his infirmities, he died at last, of an imposthume in the chest, contracted during his imprisonment in a damp cell of the Convent, on the 8th of September, 1645, having previously made his peace with God and the Church in the usual manner.

More fortunate than his master and great contemporary, Cervantes, Quevedo survives in canvas and in marble, so that we are able to realize the external features of the man. His portrait by Velasquez, representing him with a huge pair of spectacles on his nose and the cross of Santiago on his left bosom, is that by which he is best known. There is also a bust of him in the Public Library at Madrid. The first of his biographers, the Neapolitan Tarsia, has drawn this picture of him, evidently from recollection, in words: Quevedo was of middling stature; his hair black and somewhat frizzled (encrespado), his eyes very brilliant, but so short of sight that he constantly wore spectacles; the nose and other features well proportioned; and of a medium frame well made above, although lame and crippled in both feet, which were twisted inwards; somewhat bulky without being misshapen; very fair of countenance, and in the main with all those marks co-existent in his person which physiognomists commend as indicating a good temperament and a virtuous disposition. His biography by Tarsia, published in 1663, is a dull and tedious piece of work. By far the best account of Quevedo is that which I have made the basis of this sketch, the biography attached to the only complete collection of Quevedo’s works, by Don Aureliano Fernandez Guerra y Orbe, which forms three volumes in Rivadeneyra’s Biblioteca de los Autores Españoles. The Essai sur la Vie et les Œuvres de Quevedo, by Ernest Merimée (Paris, 1886), is a careful and painstaking work, of which the materials have been taken from Guerra y Orbe.

To judge the character of the man is easier for posterity than to estimate the worth of his products in literature. The greater part of his writings, those which brought him most fame in his lifetime, men have ceased to read even in Spain itself. Of the eleven octavo volumes which constituted the first complete edition of Quevedo’s works (1791-94) it may be said that it would be no loss to the world had three-fourths shared the doom which their author, on his death-bed, requested might overtake them all. The orthodox would thus have been saved much scandal, the expurgators a great deal of trouble, the critics and the commentators an endless amount of curious inquiry. The theology and the politics (these in Quevedo are much confused) have already perished. The satires have been visited by the destiny which invariably attends the works of wit which are dedicated to passing uses, when literature stoops to the service of politics.

But while the graver works of Quevedo, those which won him the applause of the learned and the favour of the great, have perished or are sunk into oblivion, there have survived enough of those lighter pieces born of his humour or his fancy, which he could scarcely be got to own in his lifetime, to keep his name alive and to secure for him a permanent place in literature. His lyrics are among the best in the language, and still keep their place in every collection of classic Castilian poetry. Those written in his early days, which include odes, sonnets, ballads, quintillas, and redondillas, mostly cast in a light and graceful mould, are distinguished for elegance of language, delicacy of fancy, and simple, tender expression. His burlesque poems (which include some pieces of a breadth such as excludes them from polite society), written in the picaresque dialect, of which, like Cervantes, he was a past master—the Jácaras, in which the people, the gitanos, the jaques, and the buzos, speak the language of Germania—the langue verte of Spain—are said still to be heard in the country, sung to the strumming of guitars. His regular verse is chiefly satire in the manner of Juvenal, against the corruption of morals and the evils of misgovernment. Of his prose writings the best are those which are purely sportive and fanciful, without serious intention, as the Visita de los Chistes, where he makes pleasant fun of the personages which figure in the old proverbs and popular sayings, as Mateo Pico, who is enshrined in the phrase, No dijerá mas Mateo Pico; Agrages, the boaster from Amadis of Gaul, who is for ever quoted as saying, Agora lo verédes (see Don Quixote, passim); Pero Grullo, the prophet who prophesied only of what he knew had come to pass; Calainos, of the ballad Cabalgaba Calainos; Don Diego de Noche; Marta, who is for ever expressing her satisfaction that though she died she died with a bellyful; and Villadiego, whose breeches have immortalized his name; with Juan Ramos, and the rest. The fun which Quevedo makes out of this flimsy material is only to be understood by those who know the proverbs of Spain, and the great part they play in the national talk and literature.

Less innocent, perhaps, are some of Quevedo’s other burlesque pieces, which neither gods, men, nor county councillors may allow. In these the poet sins, however, more from carelessness of humour than grossness of imagination. It is not his ideas that are nasty so much as his words which are coarse. He uses words at random, and is reckless of the effect produced, letting his fancy run away with his pen, to the detriment of his art. He is wanting in the exquisite simplicity and delicacy of the master of whose work he was a chief admirer, whose style he followed, and in whose path he attempted to walk—his friend, Miguel de Cervantes. So passionate was his love for Don Quixote that we are told he would throw down the book in an ecstasy and declare that he would gladly burn all his works to be able to write something like Don Quixote. Between the two wits it is pleasant to record that there was nothing like jealousy. Cervantes, in the references he makes to Quevedo, seems to speak with more than his wonted kindliness of the younger man, as though from personal intimacy. In the Voyage to Parnassus Quevedo is rallied upon his lameness with a freedom which only a friend might take. In summing up the roll of the good poets who are to be Apollo’s allies in the winning of Parnassus, the name of Quevedo is last on the list. But Cervantes interrupts the god-messenger to remind him of Quevedo’s infirmity:—