terials for a livelier production. Another work has been lately published on Spanish literature by Mr. A. F. Foster (Edinburgh, 1851), compiled in like manner from former writers, which, for succinct and able treatment of the subject, may perhaps be recommended as the one best suited to the general reader. But Mr. Ticknor's book must remain the great work of reference to the older Spanish authors, as he has left little for future writers to supply respecting them. Yet neither has he gone scarcely any further than Bouterwek, who wrote at the beginning of this century, and since whose time so many writers have arisen in Spain superior to any perhaps that have preceded them. In such works we have more cause to congratulate ourselves on having any one to undertake the labour of going over so wide a field, than to complain of his stopping short at a point where less was known of Spanish literature, and where it became so much more interesting as connected with our own times. But as all the compilers now mentioned have so confined their labours to works written previously to the present century, it may be considered acceptable, in continuation of them, that the present essay should be offered to the public. This is, however, also undertaken on a more extended and somewhat different plan; not merely giving short notices of the several authors and their works, as in the nature of a catalogue or dictionary, but taking only the principal poets for a particular account of their history, and giving translations from their works most characteristic of their genius or best suited for translation, for the purpose of enabling the critical notices respecting them to be better understood.
In treating of the literature of any country historically, it may perhaps be considered necessary to give a catalogue of every person who has published a book of any pretensions to notice, whatever the different gradations of talent between
