Their number is large, amounting in the most ample collection to above a thousand pages. The best are those that are most familiar; for even in the slightest of them, as when he is sending a present of gloves to Lady Rich, or a few new-fashioned toothpicks to the Duke of Mayenne, there is a nice preservation of the Castilian proprieties of expression. Many of them sparkle with genius; sometimes most unexpectedly, though not always in good taste; Thus, to his innocent wife, shamefully kept in prison during his exile, he says: “Though you are not allowed to write to me, or to enjoy what to the absent is the breath of life; yet here [in France] there is no punishment for the promptings of natural affection. I answer, therefore, what I hear in the spirit, your complaints of the punishment laid on your own virtues and on the innocence of your children,--complaints, which reach me from that asylum of darkness and of the shadow of death, in which you now lie. But when I listen, it seems as if I ought to hear you no less with my outward ears, just as the words and cries that come from the caves under the earth only resound the louder, as they are rolled up to us from their dark hiding-places.”[197] And again, when speaking of the cruel conduct of his judges to his family, he breaks out: “But let them not be deceived. Their victims may be imprisoned and loaded with irons; but they have the two mightiest advocates of the earth to defend them,--their innocence and their wrongs. For neither could Cicero nor Demosthenes so pierce the ears of men, nor so stir up their minds, nor so shake the frame of things, as can these two, to whom God has given the especial privilege to stand for ever in his presence, to cry for justice, and to be witnesses and advocates for one another in whatsoever he has reserved for his own awful judgment.”[198] [197] Obras, Genevra, 1654, 12mo, p. 1073. [198] Ibid., p. 96. The letters of Perez are in a great variety of styles, from the cautious and yet fervent appeals that he made to Philip the Second, down to the gallant notes he wrote to court ladies, and the overflowings of his heart to his young children. But they are all written in remarkably idiomatic Castilian, and are rendered interesting from the circumstance, that in each class there is a strict observance of such conventional forms as were required by the relative social positions of the author and his correspondents.[199]