Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/160

16 REIGN OF JOHN 11., OF CASTILE. PART and the worthy ecclesiastic consigned more than '- — a hundred volumes of it to the flames, as savouring too strongly of the black art. The Bachelor Cib- dareal, the confidential physician of John the Second, in a lively letter on this occurrence to the poet John de Mfena, remarks, that " some would fain get the reputation of saints, by making others necromancers ; " and requests his friend " to allow him to solicit, in his behalf, some of the surviving volumes from the king, that in this way the soul of Brother Lope might be saved from further sin, and the spirit of the defunct marquis consoled by the consciousness, that his books no longer rested on the shelves of the man who had converted him into a conjuror."^' John de Mena denounces this auto da fe of science in a similar, but graver tone of sarcasm, in his " Laberinto." These liberal sentiments in the Spanish writers of the fifteenth century may put to shame the more bigoted criticism of the seventeenth.^^ .Marquis of Auothcr of the illustrious wits of this reign was Saiitillaiia. " Ifiigo Lopez de Mendoza, marquis of Santillana, " the glory and delight of the Castilian nobility," whose celebrity was such, that foreigners, it was said, journeyed to Spain from distant parts of 2iCenton EpistolariOjCpist. 66. — of the posterity of Adam, from a The bishop endeavoured to transfer copy of which Villena derived his the blame of the conflagration to the science." (See Juan de Mena, king. There can be Httle doubt, Obras, fol. 139, glosa.) One however, that the good father in- would think that such an orthodox fused the suspicions of necromancy source might have justified V^illena into his master's bosom. " The in the use of it. angels," he says in one of his " Comp. .Tuan de Mena, Obras, works, " who guarded Paradise, copl. 127, 128. ; and Nic. Antonio, presented a treatise on magic to one Bibliotheca Vetus, torn. ii. p. 220