of Olivares, which he had welcomed as the dawn of a political and social regeneration, made things worse instead of better, and led the country to ruin. Quevedo saw this and could not hold his peace. An anonymous petition in verse enumerating the grievances of his subjects was found, in December 1639, under the very napkin of Philip IV. It was shown to Olivares, who exclaimed, “I am ruined”; but before his fall he sought vengeance on the libeller. His suspicions fell on Quevedo, who had enemies glad to confirm them. Quevedo was arrested on December 7, and carried under a strong escort to the monastery of St Mark at Leon, where he was kept in rigorous confinement till the fall of the minister (January 1643) restored him to light and freedom, but not to the health which he had lost in his dungeon. He had little more than two years to live, and these were spent in inactive retreat, first at La Torre de Juan Abad, and then at the neighbouring Villanueva de los Infantes, where he died September 8, 1645.
As a satirist and humorist Quevedo stands in the first rank of Spanish writers; his other literary work does not count for much. I. I. Chifliet, in a letter of February 2, 1629, calls him “a very learned man to be a Spaniard,” and indeed his erudition was of a solid kind, but he merits attention not as humanist, philosopher, and moralist, but as the keen polemic writer, the pitiless mocker, the profound observer of all that is base and absurd in human nature, and at the same time as a finished master of style and of all the secrets of the Spanish tongue. His style, indeed, is not absolutely pure; though he ridiculed so well the bad taste of culteranismo, he fell himself into the style called conceptismo, which strains after ambiguous expressions and alembicated “points.” But, though involved and overcharged with ideas, his diction is of singular force and originality; after Cervantes he is the greatest Spanish prose writer of the 17th century.
There is an excellent collected edition of Quevedo's prose works with 21 good life of the author by D. Aureliano Fernandez-Guerra (Bibl. Ribadeneyra, vols. xxiii. and xlviii.); his poetical works in vol. lxix. of the same collection are badly edited by D. Florencio Janer. There is a second edition, enlarged and annotated by Señor Menéndez y Pelayo. E. Mérimée, in Essai sur la vie et les œuvres de Francisco de Quevedo (Paris, 1886), has supplied an excellent critical and biographical monograph with a bibliography. (J. F.-K.)
QUEZAL, or Quesal, the Spanish-American name for one of the most beautiful of birds, abbreviated from the Aztec or Maya Quetzal-tototl, the last part of the compound word meaning fowl, and the first, also written Cuetzal, the long feathers of rich green with which it is adorned.[1] The Quezal is one of the Trogons (q.v.), and was originally described by Hernandez (Historia, p. 15), whose account was faithfully copied by F. Willughby. Yet the bird remained practically unknown to ornithologists until figured in 1825, from a specimen belonging to Leadbetter,[2] by C. J. Temminck (Pl. col., 372), who, however, mistakenly thought it was the same as the Trogon pavoninus, a congeneric but quite distinct species from Brazil, that had just been described by Spix. The scientific determination of the Quetzal-bird of Central America seems to have been first made by C. L. Bonaparte in 1826, as Trogon paradiseus, according to his statement in the Zoological Society's Proceedings for 1837 (p. 101); but it is not known whether the fact was ever published. In 1832 the Registro Trimestre, a literary and scientific journal printed at Mexico, contained a communication by Dr. Pablo de la Llave, describing this species (with which he first became acquainted before 1810, from examining more than a dozen specimens obtained by the natural-history expedition to New Spain and kept in the palace of the Retiro near Madrid) under the name by which it is now known, Pharomacrus mocino.[3] These facts, however, being almost unknown to the rest of the world, J. Gould, in the Zoological Proceedings for 1835 (p. 29), while pointing out Temminck's error, gave the species the name of Trogon resplendens, which it bore for some time. Yet little or nothing was generally known about the bird until Delattre sent an account of his meeting with it to the Echo du monde savant for 1843, which was reprinted in the Revue zoologique for that year (pp. 163–165). In 1860 the nidification of the species, about which strange stories had been told to the naturalist last named, was determined, and its eggs, of a pale
Quezal, male and female.
- ↑ The Mexican deity Quetzal-coatl had his name, generally translated “Feathered Snake,” from the quetzal, feather or bird, and coatl, snake, as also certain kings or chiefs, and many places, e.g. Quezalapan, Quezaltepec, and Quezaltenango, though perhaps some of the last were named directly from the personages (cf. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, vol. v., Index). Quetzal-itzli is said to be the emerald.
- ↑ This specimen had been given to Canning (a tribute, perhaps, to the statesman who boasted that he had “called a New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old”) by Mr Schenley, a diplomatist, and was then thought to be unique in Europe; but, apart from those which had reached Spain, where they lay neglected and undescribed, James Wilson says (Illustr. Zoology, pl. vi. text) that others were brought with it, and that one of them was given to the Edinburgh Museum. On the 21st day of the sale of Bullock's Museum in 1819, Lot 38 is entered in the Catalogue as “The Tail Feather of a magnificent undescribed Trogon,” and probably belonged to this species.
- ↑ De la Llave's very rare and interesting memoir was reprinted by M. Sallé in the Revue et magazin de zoologie for 1861 (pp. 23–33).
