[670] The best life of Cibdareal is prefixed to his Letters (Madrid, ed. 1775, 4to). But his birth is there placed about 1388, though he himself (Ep. 105) says he was sixty-eight years old in 1454, which gives 1386 as the true date. But we know absolutely nothing of him beyond what we find in the letters that pass under his name. The Noticia prefixed to the edition referred to was—as we are told in the Preface to the Chronicle of Alvaro de Luna (Madrid, 1784, 4to)—prepared by Llaguno Amirola.
[671] It is the last letter in the collection. See Appendix (C), on the genuineness of the whole.
[672] Cibdareal, Epist. 51.
[673] The longest extracts from the works of this remarkable family of Jews, and the best accounts of them, are to be found in Castro, “Biblioteca Española,” (Tom. I. p. 235, etc.,) and Amador de los Rios, “Estudios sobre los Judios de España” (Madrid, 1848, 8vo, pp. 339-398, 458, etc.). Much of their poetry, which is found in the Cancioneros Generales, is amatory, and is as good as the poetry of those old collections generally is. Two of the treatises of Alonso were printed;—the “Oracional,” or Book of Devotion, mentioned in the text as written for Perez de Guzman, which appeared at Murcia in 1487, and the “Doctrinal de Cavalleros,” which appeared the same year at Burgos. (Diosdado, De Prima Typographiæ Hispan. Ætate, Romæ, 1793, 4to, pp. 22, 26, 64.) Both are curious; but much of the last is taken from the “Partidas” of Alfonso the Wise.
[674] The manuscript I have used is a copy from one, apparently of the fifteenth century, in the magnificent collection of Sir Thomas Phillips, Middle Hill, Worcestershire, England. The printed poems are found in the “Cancionero General,” 1535, ff. 28, etc.; in the “Obras de Juan de Mena,” ed. 1566, at the end; in Castro, Tom. I. pp. 298, 340-342; and at the end of Ochoa’s “Rimas Ineditas de Don Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza,” Paris, 1844, 8vo, pp. 269-356. See also Mendez, Typog. Esp., p. 383; and Cancionero General, 1573, ff. 14, 15, 20-22.
[675] The “Generaciones y Semblanzas” first appeared in 1512, as part of a rifacimento in Spanish of Giovanni Colonna’s “Mare Historiarum,” which may have been the work of Perez de Guzman. They begin, in this edition, at Cap. 137, after long accounts of Trojans, Greeks, Romans, Fathers of the Church, and others, taken from Colonna. (Mem. de la Acad. de Historia, Tom. VI. pp. 452, 453, note.) The first edition of the Generaciones y Semblanzas separated from this connection occurs at the end of the Chronicle of John II., 1517. They are also found in the edition of that Chronicle of 1779, and with the “Centon Epistolario,” in the edition of Llaguno Amirola, Madrid, 1775, 4to, where they are preceded by a life of Fernan Perez de Guzman, containing the little we know of him. The suggestion made in the Preface to the Chronicle of John II., (1779, p. xi.,) that the two very important chapters at the end of the Generaciones y Semblanzas are not the work of Fernan Perez de Guzman is, I think, sufficiently answered by the editor of the Chronicle of Alvaro de Luna, Madrid, 1784, 4to, Prólogo, p. xxiii.
[676] Generaciones y Semblanzas, c. 10. A similar harshness is shown in Chapters 5 and 30.
[677] Generaciones, etc., c. 11, 15, and 24.
[678] Chrónica de Don Juan el II., Año 1437, c. 4; 1438, c. 6; 1440, c. 18.
[679] Pulgar, Claros Varones, Tít. 13. Cancionero General, 1573, f. 183. Mariana, Hist., Lib. XXIV. c. 14.