Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/167

BIRTH OF ISABELLA. 23 t same period ; ^^ and it is remarkable, that, after such chapter early promise, the modern Spaniards have not been . more successful in perfecting a classical prose style. Enough has been said to give an idea of the state of mental improvement in Castile under John the Second. The Muses, who had found a shelter in his court from the anarchy which reigned abroad, soon fled from its polluted precincts under the reign of his successor Henry the Fourth, whose sordid appetites were incapable of being elevated above the objects of the senses. If we have dwelt somewhat long on a more pleasing picture, it is because our road is now to lead us across a dreary waste exhibiting scarcely a vestige of civilization. While a small portion of the higher orders of Decline of the nation was thus endeavouring to forget the L»na. public calamities in the tranquillizing pursuit of letters, and a much larger portion in the indulgence of plccisure,^® the popular aversion for the minister I 35 Perhaps the most conspicuous df these historical compositions for mere literary execution is the Chronicle of Alvaro de Luna, to which I have had occasion to re- fer, edited in 1784, by Flores, the diligent secretary of the Royal Academy of History. He justly commends it for the purity and harmony of its diction. The loy- alty of the chronicler seduces him sometimes into a swell of panegyr- ic, which may be thought to savour too strongly of the current defect of Castilian prose ; but it more frequently imparts to his narrative a generous glow of sentiment, raising it far above the lifeless de- tails of ordinary history, and occa- sionally even to positive eloquence. Nic. Antonio, in the tenth book of his great repository, has assem- bled the biographical and biblio- graphical notices of the various Spanish authors of the fifteenth century, whose labors diffused a glimmering of light over their own age, which has become faint in the superior illumination of the succeeding. 3" Sempere in his Historia del Luxo, (tom. i. p. 177,) has pub- lished an extract from an unprinted manuscript of the celebrated mar- quis of Villena, entitled Triunfo de las Donas, in which, adverting to the petits-maitres of his time, he recapitulates the fashionable arts employed by them for the embel- lishment of the person, with a degree of minuteness, which might edify a modern dandy.