Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. El Diario De Los Literatos: A Purely Spanish Manifestation Of The New Spirit In Literary Criticism. "El Diario de los Literatos" began to appear the year of the publication of Luzan's "Poetica." The editors were M. F. Huerta, J. M. Salafranca, and L. G. Puig. None of these men were well known as authors. They belonged to the already numerous class of Spaniards who felt no superstitious respect for French ideals but who realized that these ideals contained elements which could benefit Spanish thought and Spanish life. The Founding of the Diario.—The plan of having a regularly published book review was not an altogether new one. From the prologue of the seventh volume of the "Diario" we learn that as early as 1723 some one had suggested that two "resumes" of every new book printed in Spain should be made by the royal librarian and sent to "las Academias de Paris y de Trevoux," in whose official organs no Spanish works were ever reviewed. The editors of these publications gave as an explanation of their apparent indifference, that they never had received literary communications from Madrid, whereas they were kept informed about the literary life of practically every other important capital of Europe. One Don Juan de Ferreras, whose official position we have not been able to discover, consulted on this point, replied that such an undertaking was useless, as Spanish books of the day contained neither inventions nor discoveries of any kind. As a matter of fact, abstracts had been sent to the Jesuit fathers and they had only published the titles of a few,"porque su instituto era informar a la Europa de los adelantamientos en las Artes y Ciencias y no habiendo novedad considerable en los libros que se imprimen en Espana no han querido hacer memoria de ellos." " ...