In 1747 he was appointed secretary to the Spanish embassy in Paris and, on returning to Madrid in 1750, was elected to the Academia Poetica del Buen Gusto, where, on account of his travels, he was known by the sobriquet of El Peregrino.
[1] Luzán was not the pioneer of Franco-Italian theories in Spain, but he was their most powerful exponent, and his Poetica is an admirable example of destructive criticism.
The defects of Lope de Vega and Calderón are indicated with vigilant severity, but on the constructive side Luzán is notably weak, for he merely proposes to substitute one exhausted convention for another.
The doctrine of the dramatic unities had not the saving virtues which he ascribed to it, and, though he succeeded in banishing the older dramatists from the boards, he and his school failed to produce a single piece of more than mediocre merit.
[2] His theories, derived chiefly from Muratori, were ineffective in practice; but their ingenuity cannot be denied, and they acted as a stimulus to the partisans of the national tradition.