But the most valuable monument of the cultivation of Spanish eloquence in the fourteenth century is _El Conde Lucanor_, a book of moral and political maxims, written by Don Juan Manuel, a Castilian prince. This Don Juan was one of the most distinguished men of his age.[35] He was descended, in a collateral line with the reigning family of Castile, from king Ferdinand III. usually called the SAINT. He served his sovereign Alphonso XI. with chivalrous fidelity, and by the judicious policy of his conduct, retained the favour of that prince, who certainly had reason to regard him with jealousy. After distinguishing himself by a number of honourable and gallant deeds, Alphonso appointed him governor (_adelantado mayor_) of the country bordering on the Moorish kingdom of Grenada. In this station he became the terror of the hereditary enemy of Castile. He made an irruption into Grenada, and defeated the Moorish king in a great battle. After this brilliant victory, he always acted one of the first parts in the internal troubles of Castile, and during twenty years conducted the war against the Moors. He died in 1362, leaving behind him some of the ripest fruits of his experience in his _Count Lucanor_. A Spanish book, so full of sound practical good sense, of a character so truly unostentatious, and clothed in a simple, homely, but far from inanimate garb, could scarcely be expected to belong to the fourteenth century. In estimating the merit of this work, it ought also to be recollected, that at the period in which it appeared, the taste for the wild tales of chivalry called romances had begun to prevail. Amadis de Gaul, the prototype of all subsequent knight-errantry romances, had then obtained general circulation. There is, however, in the _Count Lucanor_, no trace of romantic extravagance, none of the dreaming flights of an irregular imagination; for in every passage of the book the author shews himself a man of the world and an observer of human nature. In the course of his long experience he had formed maxims for the conduct of life which he was desirous of pursuing. He gave to many of these axioms a laconic expression in verse; and, to impress them the more forcibly, invented his _Count Lucanor_, a prince conscious of too limited an understanding to trust to his own judgment in cases of difficulty. He gives the Count a minister (_consejero_), whose wisdom fortunately supplies the deficiency of his master’s intellect. When the Count asks advice of his minister, the latter relates a story, or sometimes a fable. The application comes at the close, and the narrative is the commentary of the verse or couplet with which it terminates. In this manner forty-nine moral and political tales are told. They are not of equal merit; but though some are inferior to others, the difference is not great, and they have all the same rhetorical form. Sometimes it is the idea that gives the chief interest, sometimes the execution. Among the versified maxims are the