But let him cherish modest, humble love,
And that shall purify his heart within.
The fifth part of the first volume consists of riddles in the old style; and, as Escobar adds, they are sometimes truly very old riddles; so old, that they must have been generally known. The second volume was printed at Valladolid, 1552, and both are in folio.
[831] The volume of Corelas’s “Trezientas Preguntas” (Valladolid, 1546, 4to) is accompanied by a learned prose commentary in a respectable didactic style.
[832] Docientas Preguntas, etc., por Juan Gonzalez de la Torre, Madrid, 1590, 4to.
[833] I should rather have said, perhaps, that the Preguntas were soon restricted to the fashionable societies and academies of the time, as we see them wittily exhibited in the first jornada of Calderon’s “Secreto á voces.”
[834] The general tendency and tone of the didactic prose-writers in the reign of Charles V. prove this fact; but the Discourse of Morales, the historian, prefixed to the works of his uncle, Fernan Perez de Oliva, shows the way in which the change was brought about. Some Spaniards, it is plain from this curious document, were become ashamed to write any longer in Latin, as if their own language were unfit for practical use in matters of grave importance, when they had, in the Italian, examples of entire success before them. Obras de Oliva, Madrid, 1787, 12mo, Tom. I. pp. xvi.-xlvii.
[835] There is a letter of Villalobos, dated at Calatayud, Oct. 6, 1515, in which he says he was detained in that city by the king’s severe illness, (Obras, Çaragoça, 1544, folio, f. 71. b.) This was the illness of which Ferdinand died in less than four months afterward.
[836] Mendez, Typographía, p. 249. Antonio, Bib. Vetus, ed. Bayer, Tom. II. p. 344, note.
[837] He seems, from the letter just noticed, to have been displeased with his position as early as 1515; but he must have continued at court above twenty years longer, when he left it poor and disheartened. (Obras, f. 45.) From a passage two leaves farther on, I think he left it after the death of the Empress, in 1539.