Translation is continued at the court of Alfonso's son and successor, SANCHO IV. (d. 1295), who, as already noted, commands a version of Brunetto Latini's _Tesoro_; and the encyclopædic mania takes shape in a work entitled the _Luçidario_, a series of one hundred and six chapters, which begins by discussing "What was the first thing in heaven and earth?" and ends with reflections on the habits of animals and the whiteness of negroes' teeth. The _Gran Conquista de Ultramar_ (Great Conquest Oversea) is a perversion of the history originally given by Guillaume de Tyr (d. 1184), mixed with other fabulous elements, derived perhaps from the French, and certainly from the Provençal, which thus comes for the first time in direct contact with Castilian prose. The fragmentary Provençal _Chanson d'Antioche_ which remains can scarcely be the original form in which it was composed by its alleged author, Grégoire de Bechada: at best it is a _rifacimento_ of a previous draught. But that it was used by the Spanish translator has been amply demonstrated by M. Gaston Paris. The translator has been identified with King Sancho himself; the safer opinion is that the work was undertaken by his order during his last days, and was finished after his death. With these should be classed compilations like the _Book of Good Proverbs_, translated from Hunain ibn Ishāk al-'Ibādī; the _Bonium_ or _Bocados de Oro_, from the collections of Abu 'l Wafā Mubashshir ibn Fātik, part of which was Englished by Lord Rivers, and thence conveyed into Caxton's _Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers_; and the _Flowers of Philosophy_, a treatise composed of thirty-eight chapters of fictitious moral sentences uttered by a tribe of thinkers, culminating—fitly enough for a Spanish book—in Seneca of Córdoba. In dealing with these works it is impossible to speak precisely as to source and date: the probability is that they were put together during the reign of Sancho, who was his father's son in more than the literal sense. Like Alfonso's, his ambition was to force his people into the intellectual current of the age, and in default of native masterpieces he supplied them with foreign models whence the desired masterpieces might proceed; and, like his father, Sancho himself entered the lists with his _Castigos y Documentos_ (Admonitions and Exhortations), ninety chapters designed for the guidance of his son. This production, disfigured by the ostentatious erudition of the Middle Ages, is saved from death by its shrewd common-sense, by its practical counsel, and by the admirable purity and lucidity of style that formed the most valuable asset in Sancho's heritage. With him the literature of the thirteenth century comes to a dramatic close: the turbulent fighter, whose rebellion cut short his father's days, becomes the conscientious promoter of his father's literary tradition. FOOTNOTES: