Quintana sang also of humanity and progress, as in his ode
on the invention of printing. In politics Quintana was a
liberal; in religious beliefs, a materialist. Campoamor
has said of Quintana that he sang not of faith or
pleasures, but of duties. His enemies have accused him
of stirring the colonies to revolt by his bitter sarcasm
directed at past and contemporaneous Spanish rulers, but
this is doubtless an exaggeration. It may be said that
except in his best patriotic poems his verses lack lyric
merit and his ideas are wanting in insight and depth; but
his sincerity of purpose was in the main beyond question
and he occasionally gave expression to striking boldness
of thought and exaltation of feeling. In technique
Quintana was a follower of the Salamancan school.

The cleric Juan Nicasio GALLEGO (1777-1853) rivaled
Quintana as a writer of patriotic verses. A liberal in
politics like Quintana, Gallego also took the page xxxiii
side of his people against the French invaders and against
the servile Spanish rulers. He is best known by the ode
_El dos de mayo_, in which he exults over the rising of
the Spanish against the French on the second of May,
1808; the ode _Á la defensa de Buenos Aires_ against the
English; and the elegy _Á la muerte de la duquesa de
Frías_ in which he shows that he is capable of deep
feeling. Gallego was a close friend of Quintana, whose
salon in Madrid he frequented. Gallego wrote little, but
his works are more correct in language and style than
those of Quintana. It is interesting that although the
writings of these two poets evince a profound dislike and