[209] Mariana, Hist., Lib. I. c. 13. Saavedra, República Literaria, Madrid, 1759, 4to, p. 44. Mariana admits the want of critical exactness in some parts of his history, when, replying to a letter of Lupercio de Argensola, who had noticed his mistake in calling Prudentius a Spaniard, he says: “I never undertook to make a history of Spain, in which I should verify every particular fact; for if I had, I should never have finished it; but I undertook to arrange in a becoming style, and in the Latin language, what others had collected as materials for the fabric I desired to raise. To look up authorities for every thing would have left Spain, for another series of centuries, without a Latin History that could show itself in the world.” J. A. Pellicer, Ensayo de una Biblioteca de Traductores, p. 59. But there is another side to all this. His willing belief in the old chronicles, tempered, as it necessarily is, by his great learning, gives an air of true-heartedness and good faith to his accounts, and a picturesqueness to his details, which are singularly attractive; while, at the same time, his occasional antiquated words and phrases, so well suited to such views of his subject, add to the idiomatic richness, in which, among Spanish prose compositions, the style of Mariana is all but unrivalled. His narratives--the most important part of an historical work of this class--are peculiarly flowing, free, and impressive. The accounts of the wars of Hannibal, in the second book; those of the irruption of the Northern nations, with which the fifth opens; the conspiracy of John de Procida, in the fourteenth; the last scenes in the troubled life of Peter the Cruel, in the seventeenth; and most of the descriptions of the leading events in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, towards the conclusion of the work, give abundant proof of this peculiar historical talent. They seem instinct with life and movement. His formal speeches, in which he made Livy his model, are, generally, less fortunate. Most of them want individuality and appropriateness. But the one which in the fifth book he has given to Ruy Lope Davalos, when that nobleman offers the crown of Castile to the Infante Don Ferdinand, is remarkable for the courageous spirit in which it discusses the foundations of all political government, and leaves the rights of kings to rest on the assent of their subjects;--a boldness, it should be added, which is apparent in many other parts of his history, as it was in much of his life. The characters he has drawn of the prominent personages that, from time to time, come to the front of the stage, are almost always short, sketched with a few touches, and struck off with the hand of a master. Such are those of Alvaro de Luna, Alfonso the Wise, and the unhappy Prince of Viana, in which so few words could hardly be made to express more.