Some of the best portions of the didactic literature of Spain during the seventeenth century were partly or wholly political. Marquez, a writer in the old style of the reign of Philip the Second, published in 1612 his “Christian Governor,” a work composed at the request of the Duke of Feria, then viceroy of Sicily, and intended to serve as an answer to Machiavelli’s “Prince.”[243] Vera y Zuñiga, author of a strange epic on the conquest of Seville, who was a better minister of Philip the Third than he was poet, published in 1620 a treatise, in four discourses, on the character and duties of an ambassador; full of learning, and occasionally illustrated with appropriate anecdotes drawn from Spanish history, but citing indiscriminately books of authority and no authority on the grave subjects he discusses, and relying apparently with as much confidence upon an opinion of Ovid as upon one of Comines.[244] Fernandez de Navarrete, a secretary of the same monarch, chose his subject a little higher up, and in 1625, under the disguise of an assumed name, and in a letter to a Polish prime-minister who never existed, gave the world his notions of what “a royal favorite” should be; but it is evident that Spain only was in his thoughts when he wrote, and his little treatise is so encumbered with ill-assorted learning and ungraceful conceits that it was soon forgotten.[245] [243] “El Governador Christiano, deducido de las Vidas de Moyses y Josua, por Juan Marquez.” There are editions of 1612, 1619, 1634, etc., with translations into Italian and French. The same author wrote, also, “Dos Estados de la Espiritual Jerusalem,” 1603. He was born in 1564, and died in 1621. Capmany (Eloquencia, Tom. IV. pp. 103, etc.) praises him highly. [244] “El Embaxador, por Don Juan Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga,” Sevilla, 1620, 4to, 280 leaves. I have noticed him as an epic poet, Vol. II. p. 500. [245] “El Perfecto Privado, Carta de Lelio Peregrino á Estanislao Bordio, Privado del Rey de Polonia.” It was first printed in 1625, (Antonio, Bib. Nov.,) but I know it only in a collection called “Varios Eloquentes Libros recogidos en uno,” (Madrid, 1726, 4to,) a volume which, besides the above work of Navarrete, contains the “Retrato Político del Rey Alfonso VIII.,” by Gaspar Mercader y Cervellon, (see Ximeno, Tom. II. p. 99,) the “Govierno Moral” of Polo, noticed, II. 544, III. 111, with some discussions which it excited, and the “Lagrimas de Heraclito defendidas,” a tract by Antonio de Vieyra, read before Christina of Sweden, at Rome, to prove that the world is more worthy of being wept over than laughed at; all of them attempts at wisdom and wit in the worst taste of their times.