The General History of Spain, by the Jesuit Juan de Mariana, though not a model of historical art in the most extended sense of the term, is, in point of style, unquestionably a classic production. Mariana, who may be said to have transferred the genuine spirit of the eloquence of the sixteenth century into the seventeenth,[473] was not one of the pensioned historiographers or chroniclers who have already been frequently mentioned, and who, it must be confessed, honourably discharged their duties. He obtained reputation both in France and Italy as a professor of scholastic philosophy and theology; but his love of literary retirement induced him to return to Spain. Of his own free choice he undertook to compose a new general History of Spain from the earliest period to the death of Ferdinand the catholic. His predecessors had been sufficiently numerous, and he did not find it necessary to collect the materials for his history by laborious compilations from the old authors and chroniclers of the middle ages. He was thus at liberty to prescribe to himself a more pleasing task, namely, that of judiciously combining the most interesting events, and describing them with rhetorical precision in elegant language. With the view of acquiring a prose style, formed in the spirit of the classic historians of antiquity, Mariana composed his work originally in latin,[474] a method which Cardinal Bembo had adopted in writing his History of Venice. After he had completed this first labour, and dedicated the thirty books of his history in latin to Philip II. he followed the example of Bembo in translating it himself, and he in fact recomposed it in Spanish.[475] This work he also dedicated to the king. Though this twofold dedication might have served to prove that the author was far from being liable to the imputation of cherishing views dangerous to the state, yet a party, with whose designs several passages of this history did not accord, found it easy under the government of the ever jealous Philip, to cast on Mariana the suspicion of favouring wicked and rebellious principles. He was formally brought before the inquisition, and it was with difficulty he escaped destruction. Had he devoted more attention to the philosophy of history, he could not so easily have repelled the charge of impartiality, to aim at which was then considered an unwarrantable assumption not to be tolerated in any Spanish writer. But it is only in his style that Mariana was impartial. To exhibit facts as they stood in their natural connection, was sufficient to give umbrage to the court and the inquisition; and solely to such an exposition was it owing, that the historian’s intentions became a subject of suspicion. Elegant composition was his grand object; and in this respect he far excels Bembo, because he is not, like him, mannered. His diction is perfectly faultless, his descriptions picturesque without poetic ornament; and his narrative style may, on the whole, be accounted