Living, as she undoubtedly did, under the persuasion that she was favored with numberless revelations of this kind, she wrote boldly and rapidly, and corrected nothing. Her style, in consequence, is diffuse and open to objections, which, in Spain, the spirit of a merely literary criticism is too reverent to desire to remove. But whatever she wrote is full of earnestness, sincerity, and love; and therefore her works have never ceased to be read by those of her own nation and faith. During her life, she was persecuted by the Inquisition; but after her death, her manuscripts were collected with pious care, and published, in 1588, by Luis de Leon, who exhorts all men to follow in the bright path she has pointed out to them; adding, “She has seen God face to face, and she now shows him to you.”[239] [239] Obras de Santa Teresa, (Madrid, 1793, 2 tom. 4to,) Tom. I. p. 393. Of her letters I have spoken, _ante_, p. 135, and an excellent discussion of her character, and that of the mystical school to which she belonged, may be found in the Christian Examiner, No. 152, Boston, March, 1849. Her works are accompanied with many offers of indulgence to those who read a chapter or a letter of any of them, or hear it read. For her troubles with the Inquisition, see Llorente, Tom. III. p. 114. Santa Teresa was beatified in 1614, and canonized in 1622; besides which, in 1617 and 1626, the Cortes chose her to be the co-patroness and advocate of Spain with Santiago; an honor that was long resisted, but was urged anew by the testament of Charles II., and confirmed by the Cortes of 1812, June 28, at the urgent petition of the Carmelites, in a spirit worthy of the age in which she lived. See Southey’s Peninsular War, London, 1832, 4to, Tom. III. p. 539. This school of spiritualists, to which belonged Juan de Avila and Luis de Leon, of whom we have before spoken, had, no doubt, a very considerable effect on Spanish didactic prose. They raised its tone, and did more towards placing it on the old foundations, where the chronicles and the earlier writers of the country, like Lucena, had left it, than had been done for nearly two centuries. Such efforts gave dignity, if not purity or an exact finish, to the proper Castilian style; so that, at the end of the reign of Philip the Second, it was not only of more consequence to an author’s reputation to write well upon any grave subject in prose than it had ever been before, but, with such examples before him, it was easier to do so. In all this, the movement made was in the right direction, and produced happy results. But, on the other hand, we should remember that it confirmed in the didactic literature of the country that tendency to a diffuse and florid declamation, which was early one of its blemishes, and from which, with such authority in its favor, Castilian prose has never since been able completely to emancipate itself.