[Footnote 260: Alonso Getino writes (_op. cit._, p. 355): 'al ser elegido Provincial, nueve dias antes de morir, no puede suponerse que estuviera enfermo de consideración'. This is a guess very wide of the mark. F. de Méndez, in the _Revista Agustiniana_ (1881), quoted (p. 351) Juan Quijano, a contemporary whose chronicle is now lost, as saying that when Luis de Leon was elected Provincial he was already confined to his bed with the illness of which he died.] [Footnote 261: The portrait and character-sketch will be found in the photo-chromotype reproduction of Francisco Pacheco, _Libro de descripcion de verdaderos retratos de illustres y memorables varones_. The original is dated Sevilla, 1599. The reproduction, due to José María Asensio y Toledo, was photo-chromotyped between 1881 and 1884. Owing to the rarity of the reproduction, it has been thought desirable to reprint in an appendix the passage in which Pacheco deals with Luis de Leon.] [Footnote 262: The reference is given by C. Muiños Sáenz, _Sobre el 'Decíamos ayer'... y otros excesos_ in _La Ciudad de Dios_ (1909), vol. LXXX, p. 119.] V By his contemporaries Luis de Leon was perhaps more esteemed as a theologian or a scholar than as a man of letters. This judgement has been reversed by posterity mainly on the strength of the Spanish poems which were little known during the author's lifetime beyond a small circle of his personal friends.[263] Experts tell us that as a theologian he ranks below his master Melchor Cano; and in the annals of scholarship Luis de Leon is less conspicuous than Benito Arias Montano and than Francisco Sanchez (_el Brocense_). Few now read for pleasure the treatises which Luis de Leon composed in a dead language: in any case these treatises can add nothing to his reputation as a writer of Spanish, and it is solely as a Spanish author that he concerns us here and now. He was by no means the earliest of devout writers to use Spanish as a literary medium. There is a long and illustrious bead-roll of authors from Bernardino de Laredo to Saint Theresa to prove the contrary. Much less was Luis de Leon the first post-Renaissance scholar to recognize that Spanish had a great future before it. Yet, if we take leave to assume that Luis de Granada was an ascetic rather than an extatic, we may account Luis de Leon as perhaps the first professional scholar to perceive that Spanish was adequate to convey the subtleties of theology and the ravishments of mysticism. His chief prose works in Castilian include the _Exposicion del libro de Job_, a commentary dedicated to Madre Ana de Jesús, but not published till near the end of the eighteenth century (1779). The _provenance_ of this work calls for no explanation. Apart from the quotation of a passage in Jorge Manrique's _Coplas_, the _Exposicion del libro de Job_ offers few indications of Spanish origin and fewer personal touches. Equally Biblical in origin are a rendering of the