Quevedo’s principal works, however,--those on which his reputation mainly rests, both at home and abroad,--are in prose. The more grave will hardly come under our cognizance. They consist of a treatise on the Providence of God, including an essay on the Immortality of the Soul; a treatise addressed to Philip the Fourth, singularly called “God’s Politics and Christ’s Government,” in which he endeavours to collect a complete body of political philosophy from the example of the Saviour; treatises on a Holy Life and on the Militant Life of a Christian; and biographies of Saint Paul and Saint Thomas of Villanueva. These, with translations of Epictetus and the false Phocylides, of Anacreon, of Seneca “De Remediis utriusque Fortunæ,” of Plutarch’s “Marcus Brutus,” and other similar works, seem to have been chiefly produced by his sufferings, and to have constituted the occupation of his weary hours during his different imprisonments. As their titles indicate, they belong to theology and metaphysics rather than to elegant literature. They, however, sometimes show the spirit and the style that mark his serious poetry;--the same love of brilliancy, and the same extravagance and hyperbole, with occasional didactic passages full of dignity and eloquence. Their learning is generally abundant, but it is, at the same time, often very pedantic and cumbersome.[486] [486] These works, chiefly theological, metaphysical, and ascetic, fill more than six of the eleven octavo volumes that constitute Quevedo’s works in the edition of 1791-94, and belong to the class of didactic prose.