The first of them, and one whose name I have already cited, is Friedrich Bouterwek, who was born at Oker in the kingdom of Hanover, in 1766, and passed nearly all the more active portion of his life at Göttingen, where he died in 1828, widely respected as one of the most distinguished professors of that long favored University. A project for preparing by the most competent hands a full history of the arts and sciences from the period of their revival in modern Europe was first suggested at Göttingen by another of its well-known professors, John Gottfried Eichhorn, in the latter part of the eighteenth century. But though that remarkable scholar published, in 1796-9, two volumes of a learned Introduction to the whole work which he had projected, he went no farther, and most of his coadjutors stopped when he did, or soon afterwards. The portion of it assigned to Bouterwek, however, which was the entire history of elegant literature in modern times, was happily achieved by him between 1801 and 1819, in twelve volumes octavo. Of this division, “The History of Spanish Literature” fills the third volume, and was published in 1804;--a work remarkable for its general philosophical views, and by far the best extant on the subject it discusses; but imperfect in many particulars, because its author was unable to procure a large number of Spanish books needful for his task, and knew many considerable Spanish authors only by insufficient extracts. In 1812, a translation of it into French was printed, in two volumes, by Madame Streck, with a judicious preface by the venerable M. Stapfer;--in 1823, it came out, together with its author’s brief “History of Portuguese Literature,” in an English translation, made with taste and skill, by Miss Thomasina Ross;--and in 1829, a Spanish version of the first and smallest part of it, with important notes, sufficient with the text to fill a volume in octavo, was prepared by two excellent Spanish scholars, José Gomez de la Cortina, and Nicolás Hugalde y Mollinedo,--a work which all lovers of Spanish literature would gladly see completed.