He began his task, however, too late. He was already sixty-seven years old, and when he died, eleven years afterwards, he had been able to bring it down no further than to the union of the crowns of Castile and Leon, in 1037,--a point from which it was afterwards carried, by Sandoval, to the death of Alfonso the Seventh, in 1097, where it finally stops. Imperfect, however, as is the portion compiled in his old age by Morales, we can hardly fail to regard it, not, indeed, as so wise and well-weighed an historical composition as that of Zurita, but as one marked with much more general ability, and showing a much more enlightened spirit, than the work of Ocampo, to which it serves as a continuation. Its style, unhappily, is wanting in correctness;--a circumstance the more to be noticed, since Morales valued himself on his pure Castilian, both as the son of a gentleman of high caste, and as the nephew of Fernan de Oliva, by whom he was educated, and whose works he had published because they had done so much to advance prose composition in Spain.[203] [203] The History of Ambrosio de Morales was first published in three folios, Alcalá, 1574-77; but the best edition is that of Madrid, 1791, in six small quartos, to which are commonly added two volumes, dated 1792, on Spanish Antiquities, and three more, dated 1793, of his miscellaneous works;--the whole being preceded by the work of Ocampo, in two volumes, already noticed, and followed by the continuation of Sandoval, in one volume, a work of about equal merit with that of Morales, and first printed at Pamplona, in 1615, folio. The three authors, Ocampo, Morales, and Sandoval, taken together, are thus made to fill twelve volumes, as if they belonged to one work, to which is given the unsuitable title of “Corónica General de España.” Morales, in his youth, cruelly mutilated his person, in order to insure his priestly purity of life, and wellnigh died of the consequences. I might have mentioned here the “Comentario de la Guerra de Alemaña de Luis de Avila y Zuñiga,” a small volume, (Anvers, 1550, 12mo,) first printed in 1548, and frequently afterwards, both in Latin and French, as well as in Spanish. It is an account of the campaigns of Charles V. in Germany, in 1546 and 1547, prepared, probably, from information furnished by the Emperor himself, (Navarra, Diálogos, 1567, f. 13,) and written in a natural, but by no means polished, Castilian style. Parts of it bear internal evidence of having been composed at the very time of the events they record, and the whole is evidently the work of one of the few personal friends Charles V. ever had; one, however, who does not appear to much advantage in the private letters of Guillaume van Male, printed by the Belgian Bibliophiles, in 1843. See, _ante_, Vol. I. p. 499, n.