Since the time of Bouterwek, no foreigner has done so much to promote a knowledge of Spanish literature as M. Simonde de Sismondi, who was born at Geneva in 1773, and died there in 1842, honored and loved by all who knew his wise and generous spirit, as it exhibited itself either in his personal intercourse, or in his great works on the history of France and Italy,--two countries, to which, by a line of time-honored ancestors, he seemed almost equally to belong. In 1811, he delivered in his native city a course of brilliant lectures on the literature of the South of Europe, and in 1813, published them at Paris. They involved an account of the Provençal and the Portuguese, as well as of the Italian and the Spanish;--but in whatever relates to the Spanish Sismondi was even less well provided with the original authors than Bouterwek had been, and was, in consequence, under obligations to his predecessor, which, while he takes no pains to conceal them, diminish the authority of a work that will yet always be read for the beauty of its style and the richness and wisdom of its reflections. The entire series of these lectures was translated into German by L. Hain in 1815, and into English with notes by T. Roscoe in 1823. The part relating to Spanish literature was published in Spanish, with occasional alterations and copious and important additions by José Lorenzo Figueroa and José Amador de los Rios, at Seville, in 2 vols. 8vo, 1841-2,--the notes relating to Andalusian authors being particularly valuable. None but those who have gone over the whole ground occupied by Spanish literature can know how great are the merits of scholars like Bouterwek and Sismondi,--acute, philosophical, and thoughtful,--who, with an apparatus of authors so incomplete, have yet done so much for the illustration of their subject. CHAPTER III. ALFONSO THE WISE.--HIS LIFE.--HIS LETTER TO PEREZ DE GUZMAN.--HIS CÁNTIGAS IN THE GALICIAN.--ORIGIN OF THAT DIALECT AND OF THE PORTUGUESE.--HIS TESORO.--HIS PROSE.--LAW CONCERNING THE CASTILIAN.--HIS CONQUISTA DE ULTRAMAR.--OLD FUEROS.--THE FUERO JUZGO.--THE SETENARIO.--THE ESPEJO.--THE FUERO REAL.--THE SIETE PARTIDAS AND THEIR MERITS.--CHARACTER OF ALFONSO. The second known author in Castilian literature bears a name much more distinguished than the first. It is Alfonso the Tenth, who, from his great advancement in various branches of human knowledge, has been called Alfonso the Wise, or the Learned. He was the son of Ferdinand the Third, a saint in the Roman calendar, who, uniting anew the crowns of Castile and Leon, and enlarging the limits of his power by important conquests from the Moors, settled more firmly than they had before been settled the foundations of a Christian empire in the Peninsula.[36] [36] Mariana, Hist., Lib. XII. c. 15, ad fin.