The number of proverbs, indeed, was soon so great,--not only those floating about in the common talk of men, but those collected and printed,--that they began to be turned to account. Garay, who was attached to the cathedral of Toledo, and therefore lived in the centre of whatever was peculiarly Castilian, wrote a long letter, every sentence of which was a popular saying; to which he added two similar letters, found, as he says, by accident, and made up, in the same way, of proverbs.[230] But, in the middle of the century, a still higher honor awaited the old Spanish adages. Pedro Valles, who wrote the history of the great Marquis of Pescara, published an alphabetical series of four thousand three hundred of them in 1549; and the famous Greek scholar and distinguished nobleman, Hernan Nuñez de Guzman, Professor successively at Alcalá and at Salamanca, found amusement for his old age in making another series of them, which amounted in all to above six thousand. To some he added explanations; to others, various parallel sayings from different languages; but, finding his strength fail him, he gave the task to a friend, who, like himself, was a Professor in Salamanca, and who published the whole in 1555, two years after the death of Nuñez; rather, as he intimates, from respect to the person from whom he received it, than from regard to the dignity of the employment.[231] [230] I have never seen the Proverbs collected by Pedro Valles, the Aragonese, but Mayans y Siscar had in his library a copy of them, which is described in the “Specimen Bibliothecæ Hispano-Majansianæ, etc., ex Musæo Davidis Clementis,” Hannoveræ, 1753, 4to, p. 67. The “Cartas de Blasco de Garay” have been often printed; but the oldest and most complete edition I have seen is that of Venice, 1553, 12mo; probably not the first. The second of the letters of Garay is not in proverbs, and, in this edition, is followed by a devout prayer; the whole being intended, as the author says, “to win the attention not so much of the wise as of those who are wont to read nothing but Celestina and such like books.” The “Proverbios” of Francisco de Castilla, in the volume with his “Theórica de Virtudes,” (1552, ff. 64-69,) are not proverbs, but an exhortation in verse to a wise and holy life. [231] “Refranes, etc., que coligio y gloso, el Comendador, Hernan Nuñez, Profesor de Retórica en la Universidad de Salamanca,” Madrid, 1619, 4to. The preface, by Leo de Castro, implies that the volume was printed during the life of Nuñez, who died in 1553; but I find no edition older than that of 1555. See the note of Pellicer to Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 34.