[290] A notice of him is prefixed to his “Claros Varones” (Madrid, 1775, 4to); but it is not much. We know from himself that he was an old man in 1490.
[291] The first edition of his Chronicle, published by an accident, as if it were the work of the famous Antonio de Lebrija, appeared in 1565, at Valladolid. But the error was soon discovered, and in 1567 it was printed anew, at Saragossa, with its true author’s name. The only other edition of it, and by far the best of the three, is the beautiful one, Valencia, 1780, folio. See the Prólogo to this edition for the mistake by which Pulgar’s Chronicle was attributed to Lebrija.
[292] Read, for instance, the long speech of Gomez Manrique to the inhabitants of Toledo. (Parte II. c. 79.) It is one of the best, and has a good deal of merit as an oratorical composition, though its Roman tone is misplaced in such a chronicle. It is a mistake, however, in the publisher of the edition of 1780 to suppose that Pulgar first introduced these formal speeches into the Spanish. They occur, as has been already observed, in the Chronicles of Ayala, eighty or ninety years earlier.
[293] “Indicio harto probable de que falleció ántes de la toma de Granada,” says Martinez de la Rosa, “Hernan Perez del Pulgar, el de las Hazañas.” Madrid, 1834, 8vo, p. 229.
[294] This important document, which does Pulgar some honor as a statesman, is to be found at length in the Seminario Erudito, Madrid, 1788, Tom. XII. pp. 57-144.
[295] Some account of the Passo Honroso is to be found among the Memorabilia of the time in the “Crónica de Juan el IIº,” (ad Ann. 1433, Cap. 5,) and in Zurita, “Anales de Aragon” (Lib. XIV. c. 22). The book itself, “El Passo Honroso,” was prepared on the spot, at Orbigo, by Delena, one of the authorized scribes of John II.; and was abridged by Fr. Juan de Pineda, and published at Salamanca, in 1588, and again at Madrid, under the auspices of the Academy of History, in 1783 (4to). Large portions of the original are preserved in it verbatim, as in sections 1, 4, 7, 14, 74, 75, etc. In other parts, it seems to have been disfigured by Pineda. (Pellicer, note to Don Quixote, Parte I. c. 49.) The poem of “Esvero y Almedora,” in twelve cantos, by D. Juan María Maury, (Paris, 1840, 12mo,) is founded on the adventures recorded in this Chronicle, and so is the “Passo Honroso,” by Don Ángel de Saavedra, Duque de Rivas, in four cantos, in the second volume of his Works (Madrid, 1820-21, 2 tom. 12mo).
[296] See Sections 23 and 64; and for a curious vow made by one of the wounded knights, that he would never again make love to nuns as he had done, see Sect. 25.
[297] Don Quixote makes precisely such a use of the Passo Honroso as might be expected from the perverse acuteness so often shown by madmen,—one of the many instances in which we see Cervantes’s nice observation of the workings of human nature. Parte I. c. 49.
[298] Take the years immediately about 1434, in which the Passo Honroso occurred, and we find four or five instances. (Crónica de Juan el IIº, 1433, Cap. 2; 1434, Cap. 4; 1435, Capp. 3 and 8; 1436, Cap. 4.) Indeed, the Chronicle is full of them; and in several, the Great Constable Alvaro de Luna figures.
[299] The “Seguro de Tordesillas” was first printed at Milan, 1611; but the only other edition, that of Madrid, 1784, (4to,) is much better.