[281] There is an edition of the Tesoro of Covarrubias, by Benito Remigio Noydens, (Madrid, 1674, folio,) which is better and ampler than the original work.
[282] The “Ortografía de la Lengua Castellana,” (Mexico, 1609, 4to, ff. 83) is a pleasant and important treatise, which, as the novelist intimates, he began to write in Castile and finished in Mexico. It proposes to reverse the letter ↄ in order to express the soft ch as in mucho, to be printed muↄo; uses two forms of the letter r; writes the conjunction y always i, as Salvá now insists it should be; and claims j, ll, and ñ to be separate letters, as they have long been admitted to be.
In speaking of Aleman, I am reminded of his “San Antonio de Padua,” printed in 12mo, at Valencia, in 1607, ff. 309. It belongs to the same class of books with the “San Patricio” of Montalvan, (see, ante, Vol. II. p. 298,) but is more elaborate and more devout. The number of the Saint’s miracles that it records is very great. Whether he invented any of them for the occasion, I do not know; but they sometimes read as much like novelas as some of his stories in the “Guzman” do, and are always written in the same idiomatic and unadulterated Castilian. It is introduced by a cancion in honor of it by Lope de Vega; but I cannot find that it was ever reprinted;—why, it is difficult to say, for it is an uncommonly attractive book of its class.
[283] The difficulties in Castilian orthography are set forth in the “Diálogo de las Lenguas” (Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, Tom. II. pp. 47-65); but the ingenious author of that discussion is more severe than was necessary on Lebrixa. An anonymous writer of an excellent essay on the same subject, in the first volume of the Repertorio Americano, (Tom. I. p. 27,) is a great deal more judicious. But how unsettled much still remains in practice may be seen in the “Manual del Cajista, por José María Palacios,” Madrid, 1845, 18mo, where (pp. 134-154) is a “Prontuario de las Voces de dudosa Ortografía,” containing above 1800 words.
[284] Of Lebrixa’s Grammar I have already spoken, (Vol. I. p. 549,) and the memory of it was now so much revived that a counterfeit edition of it was published, about 1775, in small folio, hardly, I should judge from its appearance, with the intention of deceiving. But such things were not uncommon about that time, as Mendez says, who thinks the edition in question had been printed about twenty years when he published his work in 1796. (See Typog., p. 242.) It is, however, already so rare, that I obtained a copy of it with difficulty.
That of Gayoso was first printed at Madrid, in 1745, 12mo, and that of San Pedro in Valencia, 1769, 12mo, which last Gayoso, disguising himself under a sort of anagram, attacked, in his “Conversaciones Críticas, por Don Antonio Gobeyos,” (Madrid, 1780, 12mo,) where he shows that San Pedro was not so original as he ought to have been, but treats his Grammar with more harshness than it deserved. Salvá’s “Gramática de la Lengua Castellana como ahora se halla” was first printed in 1831, and the sixth edition appeared at Madrid in 1844, 12mo; a striking proof of the want of such a book.
[285] Gregorio Garcés, whose “Fundamento del Vigor y Elegancia de la Lengua Castellana” was printed at Madrid, 1791, 2 tom. 8vo, was a Jesuit, and prepared this excellent work in exile at Ferrara, in which city he lived above thirty years, and from which he returned home in 1798, under the decree of Charles IV. abrogating that of his father for the expulsion of the Order from Spain, in 1767.
[286] See, ante, Part II. c. 5, and note, Vol. I. p. 537.
[287] For an account of these Academies, see Guarinos, “Biblioteca”; and for a notice of the origin of the Royal Academy of History, see the first volume of its Memoirs. The old Academias, in imitation of the Italian,—such as are ridiculed in the “Diablo Cojuelo,” Tranco IX.,—had much gone out of fashion and been displaced by the modern Tertulias, where both sexes meet, and which in their turn have been ridiculed in the Saynetes of Ramon de la Cruz and Castillo.
[288] There is an edition of the “Nuevo Mundo,” printed at Barcelona, 1701, 4to, containing many blanks, which the author announces his intention to fill up. Of the “Alfonso, ó la Fundacion del Reyno de Portugal,” there are editions of 1712, 1716, 1731, and 1737. There is a notice of the author—Francisco Botelho Moraes e Vasconcellos—in Barbosa, (Tom. II. p. 119,) and at the end of the edition of the Alfonso, Salamanca, 1731, 4to, is a defence of a few peculiarities in its orthography. “Las Cuevas de Salamanca” (s. l. 1734) is a small volume, divided into seven books, written, perhaps, at Salamanca itself, which Moraes loved, and where he retired in his old age. He published one or two works in Spanish, besides those already mentioned, and one or two in Latin, but no others of consequence.