[186] “Las Tarascas de Madrid y Tribunal Espantoso,” Madrid, 1664, Valencia, 1694, etc. “La Tarasca de Parto en el Meson del Infierno y Dias de Fiestas por la Noche,” Madrid, 1671, Valencia, 1694, are again interesting, partly because they contain anecdotes and sketches that serve to explain the popular religious theatre.
[187] “Los Gigantones de Madrid por defuera,” Madrid, 1666, 12mo.
[188] The Spanish tales of the middle and latter part of the seventeenth century are much infected with the false taste of cultismo; no portion of Spanish literature more so. As we approach the end of the century, not one, I think, is free from it.
[189] Italy is the only country that can enter into competition with Spain in the department of tales, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, I am not certain, considering the short period (a little more than a century) during which Spanish tales were fashionable, that as many in proportion were not produced as were produced of Italian tales in Italy during the long period—four centuries and a half—in which they have now been prevalent there. And if, to the Spanish tales found in books professing and not professing to be collections of them, we add the thousands used up in Spanish dramas, to which the elder Italian theatre offers no counterpart, I suppose there can hardly be a doubt that there are really more Spanish fictions of this class in existence than there are Italian. If, however, we were to settle the point only by a comparison of the meagre and imperfect catalogues of Spanish stories in Antonio’s Bibliotheca with the admirably complete one of Italian stories in the “Bibliografia delle Novelle Italiane,” by Gamba, we should settle it differently. But, in any event, when speaking of the Italian novelle, we should remember, that, until very lately, the whole spirit and power of fiction in Italy, so to speak, have been taken from the theatre and romances, and cast into these short tales.
[190] Puibusque, Histoire Comparée, Tom. II. c. 3.
[191] The most remarkable, and perhaps the most beautiful, specimen is in the first book of “The Names of Christ”; the text being from Isaiah, ix. 6: “The everlasting Father.”
[192] See the accounts of Luis de Granada in Antonio, and in the Preface to the “Guia de Pecadores,” Madrid, 1781, 2 tom. 8vo. His treatise on pulpit eloquence, entitled “Rhetoricæ Ecclesiasticæ, sive de Ratione Concionandi, Libri Sex,” was valued in other countries. An edition of it, Cologne, 1611, 12mo, fills above 500 closely printed pages. It is somewhat remarkable, that, besides the sermon on the Resurrection, from which the extract I have translated was made, one of the best of his meditations, that entitled “De la Alegría de los Santos Padres,” is on the same subject. He was born in 1504, and died in 1588.
[193] For Paravicino and his school, see Sedano, (Parnaso Español, Tom. V. p. xlviii.,) Baena, (Hijos de Madrid, Tom. II. p. 389,) and Antonio, (Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 612,) who speaks as if he had often heard Paravicino’s eloquence, and witnessed its effects. E contra is Figueroa, who, in his “Pasagero,” (1617, Alivio IV.,) is severe upon the preachers and audiences of Madrid. The fact, however, that Capmany, in his five important volumes devoted to Spanish eloquence, has been able to find nothing in the seventeenth century, either in the way of forensic orations or popular pulpit eloquence, with which to fill his pages, but is obliged to resort to the eloquent prose of history and philosophy, of ethics and religious asceticism, tells at once, in a way not to be mistaken, the tale of the deficiencies in Castilian eloquence, as the word eloquence is understood in English.
[194] These writers have all been mentioned earlier, (see, ante, Vol. I. pp. 395, 540, 543,) except Queen Isabella, whose letters are best found in Clemencin’s excellent work on her character and times, filling the sixth volume of the “Memorias de la Academia de la Historia.” They are addressed to her confessor, Hernando de Talavera, and strongly illustrate both her prudence and her submission to ecclesiastical influences. (See pp. 351-383.) Several letters addressed to Columbus, and marked with her spirit rather than that of her husband, though signed by both of them, may be seen in the second volume of Navarrete, (Viages, etc.,) which is rich in such curious documents.
[195] The correspondence of Zurita and his friends is to be sought in the “Progresos de la Historia en el Reyno de Aragon,” by Diego Josef Dormer, (Zaragoza, 1680, folio,) and especially pp. 362-563, which are entirely given up to it.