filibusters. The latter, therefore, must have felt that they were aiding their own country as well as France when they participated in the July revolution of 1830. Espronceda fought bravely for several days at one of the Paris barricades, and wreaked what private grudge he may have had against the house of Bourbon. After the fall of Charles X, Louis Philippe, whom Espronceda was in after years to term el rey mercader, became king of France. As Ferdinand refused to recognize the new government, the designs of Spanish patriots were not hindered but even favored. Espronceda was one of a scant hundred visionaries who followed General Joaquín de Pablo over the pass of Roncevaux into Navarra. The one hope of success lay in winning over recruits on Spanish soil. De Pablo, who found himself facing his old regiment of Volunteers of Navarra, started to make a harangue. The reply was a salvo of musketry, as a result of which De Pablo fell dead. After some skirmishing most of his followers found refuge on French soil, among them Espronceda. De Pablo's rout, if less glorious than that of Roland on the same battlefield, nevertheless inspired a song. Espronceda celebrated his fallen leader's death in the verses "A la Muerte de D. Joaquín de Pablo (Chapalangarra) en los Campos de Vera." This poem, which purports to have been written on one of the peaks of the French Pyrenees which commanded a view of Spanish soil, and when the poet was strongly impressed by the events in which he had just participated, is nevertheless a weak performance; for Espronceda in 1830 was still casting his most impassioned utterances in the classic mold. Ferdinand had now been taught a lesson and lost little time in recognizing the new régime in France. This bit of diplomacy was so cheap and successful that Louis Philippe tried it again, this time on Russia. His government favored a plot, hatched in Paris, for the freeing of Poland. Espronceda, who had not yet had his fill of crack-brained adventures, enlisted in this cause also, desiring to do for Poland what Byron had done for Greece; but the czar, wilier than Ferdinand, immediately recognized Louis Philippe. The plot was then quietly rendered innocuous. Espronceda must have felt himself cruelly sold by the "merchant king."

Espronceda's literary activity was slight during these events, but his transformation into a full-fledged Romanticist begins at this time. Hugo's "Orientales," which influenced him profoundly, appeared in 1829, and the first performance of "Hernani" was February 25, 1830. There is no record that he formed important literary friendships in either England or France, but, clannish as the emigrados appear to have been, an impressionable nature like Espronceda's must have 

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