CIENFUEGOS, Nicasio Alvaeez de (1762-1809), poet and publicist, was born at Madrid. He studied with distinction at Salamanca, where he sat at the feet of the poet Melendez Valdez. The year 1778 saw the first of his poems published, and the attention of his countrymen was immediately attracted. He was appointed editor of the Government organs, the G ax et a and Mercurio, and an article on Napoleon published in the former drew down on him the heavy hand of Murat. Cienfuegos was condemned to death; he refused submission, and would assuredly have been executed but for the prayers of his friends. At their instance the sentence was commuted into one of deportation into France. Worn out with grief and fatigue, he died at Orthez in the following year. His verses are imitated from these of Melendez Valdez; they are by no means deficient in science or passion, but they are too often disfigured by a spurious sentimentality and by an affectation of the flimsy philosophy of the age. He was blamed for an unsparing use at once of archaisms and of novelties, which some regarded with approval, but others denounced him as a traitor to the glorious traditions of Castilian art, and as bent on Frenchifying the noble Castilian idiom. His plays— Pitaco, Zoraιda, La Condesα de Castilla, and Idomeneo, four tragedies on the pseudoclassic French model, and Las Herrnanas Generosas, a comedy—have been long forgotten both in the closet and on the stage. See Ticknor, History of Spanish, Literature, vol. iit; and Cienfuegos, Obras Poeticas, 2 vols., Madrid, 1816.