ABSTRACT
During the first half of the eighteenth century discussion raged hotly over the Poetica of Don Ignacio Luzan, a book written with the avowed object of supporting the doctrines of the French classical school, and explaining the mysteries of the unities to a nation sunk in darkness. Luzan was a clever man of narrow views, which caused him to exaggerate the importance of his precepts. When at the beginning of the eighteenth century the last feeble representative of the great House of Austria died, and the succession fell to the Bourbons, it was inevitable that French influences should become paramount in Spain. The falling off from the best poets of the seventeenth century to Iglesias, Cienfuegos, and Menendez Valdes in the eighteenth is almost incredible. Two other churchmen, one a Jesuit and the other a Benedictine, both of them natives of Galicia, attained considerable reputation during the eighteenth century, but rather as scholars than as men of letters.
