It would be easy to add to these two writers on ecclesiastical history the names of many more. Hardly a convent or a saint of any note in Spain, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, failed of especial commemoration; and each of the religious orders and great cathedrals had at least one historian, and most of them several. The number of books on Spanish ecclesiastical history to be found in the list at the end of the second volume of Antonio’s Bibliotheca Nova is, therefore, one that may well be called enormous. Some of them, too, like the history of the order of St. Benedict, by Yepes, and several of the histories of those orders that were both knightly and religious, are of no little importance for the facts and documents with which they are crowded. But nearly all of them are heavy, monkish annals, and not one, I believe, has literary merit enough to attract our attention. From the nature of their subjects, however, neither of them rose to be the great historian of his country;--an honor which belongs to Juan de Mariana, a foundling, who was born at Talavera in 1536, and whose extraordinary talents attracted the attention of the Jesuits, then fast advancing into notice as a religious power. Having gone through a severe course of studies at Alcalá, he was selected, at the age of twenty-four, to fill the most important place in the great college which the members of his society were then establishing at Rome, and which they regarded as one of their principal institutions for consolidating and extending their influence. After five years, he was removed to Sicily, to introduce similar studies into that island; and, a little later, he was transferred to Paris, where he was received with honor, and taught for several years, lecturing chiefly on the works and opinions of Thomas Aquinas, to crowded audiences. But the climate of France was unfriendly to his health, and in 1574, having spent thirteen years in foreign countries, as a public instructor, he returned to Spain, and established himself in the house of his order at Toledo, which he hardly left during the forty-nine remaining years of his life.