[218] “Historia de los Movimientos, Separacion, y Guerra de Cataluña, por Francisco Manuel de Melo,” Lisboa, 1645, and several other editions; one by Sanchez, 1808, 12mo, and one at Paris, 1830. His poetry in Spanish has been mentioned, _ante_, II. 529. For his life and multitudinous works, see the “Bibliotheca Lusitana” of Diogo Barbosa Machado, (Lisboa, 1741-59, 4 tom. folio,) which I have often referred to, as to the great authority on all matters of fact in Portuguese literary history, though of little or no value for the literary opinions it expresses. It is one of the amplest and most important works of literary biography and bibliography ever published; but, unhappily, it is also one of the rarest, a large part of the impression of the first three volumes having been destroyed in the fire that followed the great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755. Its author, who gives some account of himself in his own work, was born in 1682, and died, I believe, in 1770. From this period, prose composition, which had been long infected with the bad taste of the age, suffered a still further and more marked decline. Saavedra Faxardo, indeed, who lived forty years out of Spain, employed in diplomatic missions, was educated in a better school, and formed himself on more worthy models, than he could have found among his contemporaries at home; but his “History of the Goths in Spain” is an imperfect work, published in 1646, at Munster, when he was there as a member of the congress that made the peace of Westphalia, and was left unfinished at his death, which occurred at Madrid two years later.[219] The only historian of eminence that remains to be noticed in this period is, therefore, Solís. [219] The work of Saavedra was continued, very poorly, by Alonso Nuñez de Castro, through the reign of Henry II., the labors of both making seven volumes in the edition of Madrid, 1789-90, 12mo, of which the first two only, coming down to 716, are by Saavedra.