[269] The first edition of Ayala’s Chronicles is of Seville, 1495, folio, but it seems to have been printed from a MS. that did not contain the entire series. The best edition is that published under the auspices of the Academy of History, by D. Eugenio de Llaguno Amirola, its secretary (Madrid, 1779, 2 tom. 4to). That Ayala was the authorized chronicler of Castile is apparent from the whole tone of his work, and is directly asserted in an old MS. of a part of it, cited by Bayer in his notes to N. Antonio, Bib. Vet., Lib. X. cap. 1, num. 10, n. 1. For such an undertaking Ayala was singularly well fitted. Spanish prose was already well advanced in his time; for Don John Manuel, the last of the elder school of good writers, did not die till Ayala was fifteen years old. He was, moreover, as we have seen, a scholar, and, for the age in which he lived, a remarkable one; and, what is of more importance than either of these circumstances, he was personally familiar with the course of public affairs during the forty-six years embraced by his Chronicle. Of all this traces are to be found in his work. His style is not, like that of the oldest chroniclers, full of a rich vivacity and freedom; but, without being over-carefully elaborated, it is simple and business-like; while, to give a more earnest air, if not an air of more truth to the whole, he has, in imitation of Livy, introduced into the course of his narrative set speeches and epistles intended to express the feelings and opinions of his principal actors more distinctly than they could be expressed by the mere facts and current of the story. Compared with the Chronicle of Alfonso the Wise, which preceded it by above a century, it lacks the charm of that poetical credulity which loves to deal in doubtful traditions of glory, rather than in those ascertained facts which are often little honorable either to the national fame or to the spirit of humanity. Compared with the Chronicle of Froissart, with which it was contemporary, we miss the honest-hearted, but somewhat childlike, enthusiasm that looks with unmingled delight and admiration upon all the gorgeous phantasmagoria of chivalry, and find, instead of it, the penetrating sagacity of an experienced statesman, who looks quite through the deeds of men, and, like Comines, thinks it not at all worth while to conceal the great crimes with which he has been familiar, if they can be but wisely and successfully set forth. When, therefore, we read Ayala’s Chronicle, we do not doubt that we have made an important step in the progress of the species of writing to which it belongs, and that we are beginning to approach the period when history is to teach with sterner exactness the lesson it has learned from the hard experience of the past.