[192] See the accounts of Luis de Granada in Antonio, and in the Preface to the “Guia de Pecadores,” Madrid, 1781, 2 tom. 8vo. His treatise on pulpit eloquence, entitled “Rhetoricæ Ecclesiasticæ, sive de Ratione Concionandi, Libri Sex,” was valued in other countries. An edition of it, Cologne, 1611, 12mo, fills above 500 closely printed pages. It is somewhat remarkable, that, besides the sermon on the Resurrection, from which the extract I have translated was made, one of the best of his meditations, that entitled “De la Alegría de los Santos Padres,” is on the same subject. He was born in 1504, and died in 1588. It would not be easy to select a more striking example than this of the peculiar rhetoric that was most sought in the Spanish pulpit. But the portions of equal merit are few, and the amount of the whole is small. After the beginning of the seventeenth century, the affected style of Góngora and the conceits of the school of Ledesma found their way into the churches generally, and especially into the churches of Madrid. This was natural. No persons depended more on the voice of fashion than the preachers of the court and the capital, and the fashion of both was thoroughly infected with the new doctrines. Paravicino, at this period, was at the head of the popular preachers; himself a poet devoted to the affectations of Góngora; a man of wit, a gentleman, and a courtier. From 1616 he was, during twenty years, pulpit orator to Philip the Third and Philip the Fourth, and enjoyed, as such, a kind and degree of popularity before unknown. As might have been expected, he had many followers, each of whom sought to have a fashionable audience. Such audiences were soon systematically provided. They were, in fact, collected, arranged, and seated by the friends and admirers of the preacher himself,--generally by those who, from their ecclesiastical relations, had an interest in his success; and then the crowds thus gathered were induced in different ways to express their approbation of the more elaborate passages in his discourse. From this time, and in this way, religious dignity disappeared from the Spanish pulpit, and whatever there was of value in its eloquence was confined to two forms,--the learned discussions, often in Latin, addressed to bodies of ecclesiastics, and the extemporaneous exhortations addressed to the lower classes;--the latter popular and vehement in their tone, and, by their coarseness, generally unworthy of the solemn subjects they touched.[193]