[90] The extracts are in Castro, (Tom. II. pp. 725-729,) and the book, which contained forty-nine chapters, was called “Castigos y Documentos para bien vivir, ordenados por el Rey Don Sancho el Quarto, intitulado el Brabo”; _Castigos_ being used to mean _advice_, as in the old French poem, “Le _Castoiement_ d’un Père a son Fils”; and _Documentos_ being taken in its primitive sense of _instructions_. The spirit of his father seems to speak in Sancho, when he says of kings, “que han de governar regnos e gentes con ayuda de çientificos sabios.” Lorenzo was an ecclesiastic,--_bon clérigo é ondrado_,--and his home was at Astorga, in the northwestern portion of Spain, on the borders of Leon and Galicia. Berceo belonged to the same territory, and, though there may be half a century between them, they are of a similar spirit. We are glad, therefore, that the next author we meet, Don John Manuel, takes us from the mountains of the North to the chivalry of the South, and to the state of society, the conflicts, manners, and interests, that gave us the “Poem of the Cid,” and the code of the “Partidas.” Don John was of the blood royal of Castile and Leon; grandson of Saint Ferdinand, nephew of Alfonso the Wise, and one of the most turbulent and dangerous of the Spanish barons of his time. He was born in Escalona, on the 5th of May, 1282, and was the son of Don Pedro Manuel, an Infante of Spain,[91] brother of Alfonso the Wise, with whom he always had his officers and household in common. Before Don John was two years old, his father died, and he was educated by his cousin, Sancho the Fourth, living with him on a footing like that on which his father had lived with Alfonso.[92] When twelve years old he was already in the field against the Moors, and in 1310, at the age of twenty-eight, he had reached the most considerable offices in the state; but Ferdinand the Fourth dying two years afterwards, and leaving Alfonso the Eleventh, his successor, only thirteen months old, great disturbances followed till 1320, when Don John Manuel became joint regent of the realm; a place which he suffered none to share with him, but such of his near relations as were most involved in his interests.[93] [91] Argote de Molina, Sucesion de los Manueles, prefixed to the Conde Lucanor, 1575. The date of his birth has been heretofore considered unsettled, but I have found it given exactly by himself in an unpublished letter to his brother, the Archbishop of Toledo, which occurs in a manuscript in the National Library at Madrid, to be noticed hereafter.