[194] These writers have all been mentioned earlier, (see, _ante_, Vol. I. pp. 395, 540, 543,) except Queen Isabella, whose letters are best found in Clemencin’s excellent work on her character and times, filling the sixth volume of the “Memorias de la Academia de la Historia.” They are addressed to her confessor, Hernando de Talavera, and strongly illustrate both her prudence and her submission to ecclesiastical influences. (See pp. 351-383.) Several letters addressed to Columbus, and marked with her spirit rather than that of her husband, though signed by both of them, may be seen in the second volume of Navarrete, (Viages, etc.,) which is rich in such curious documents. From these remarks, however, we should except portions of the correspondence of Zurita, the historian, extending over the last thirty years of his life, and ending in 1582, just before his death. They give us the business-like intercourse of a man of letters, carried on with all classes of society, from ministers of state and the highest ecclesiastics of the realm down to persons distinguished only because they were occupied in studies like his own. The number of letters in this collection is large, amounting to above two hundred. More of them are from Antonio Agustin, Archbishop of Tarragona, an eminent scholar in Spanish history and civil law, than from any other person; but the most interesting are from Zurita himself, from his friend Ambrosio Morales, from Diego de Mendoza, the historian, Argote de Molina, the antiquarian, and Fernan Nuñez, the Greek Commander. Each of these series is marked by something characteristic of its author, and all of them, taken together, show more familiarly the interior condition of a scholar’s life in Spain, in the sixteenth century, than it can be found anywhere else.[195] [195] The correspondence of Zurita and his friends is to be sought in the “Progresos de la Historia en el Reyno de Aragon,” by Diego Josef Dormer, (Zaragoza, 1680, folio,) and especially pp. 362-563, which are entirely given up to it.