II.
"The 'Alfabeto Christiano' is a book unknown even to bibliographers for the last three centuries. It had its origin in an actual conversation between Juan de Valdés, twin brother to the Latin secretary of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and Giulia Gonzaga, Duchess of Trajetto and Countess of Fondi, at Naples, about the close of 1535, or the beginning of the following year. At her request it was immediately afterwards written down by him in Spanish, to promote her instruction and refresh her memory. It now essentially conveys to us the spirit and substance of the conversation in the precise form and manner in which it took place between them."—Introduction by Benjamin B. Wiffen, Esq., to his translation of the "Alfabeto Christiano."
"It was printed at a time when for a few years the press of Venice was comparatively free; and when, taking advantage of this liberty, then existing nowhere else in Italy, it multiplied the tracts of the Reformation by thousands. When the friends of Valdés were afterwards persecuted at Naples, and his name condemned by the authority of Rome, implicating by connection with him, one of the most distinguished members of the noble family of the Gonzagas,—all parties, friends equally with opponents, would of course be concerned to observe silence on the subject; while all the friends of the family would be urged alike by religious sentiment and by family considerations to destroy silently and irrecoverably every copy of a book that appeared to cast, by its association with her name, the shadow of its principles upon those who were allied to her."—Ibid.
The passage describing the manner in which a stray copy fell into his hands, and the circumstances under which he perused it, is one of the pleasantest in Mr. Wiffen's Introduction. McCrie quotes a passage from Fontaine, who tells us that "on taking down an old house at Urbino, in 1728, the workmen disinterred a copy of Bruccioli's 'Paraphrase of St. Paul's Epistles,' with some books of Ochino, Valdés, and others of the same kind, which had remained in concealment for more than a century and a half."