The last is by Vincencio Carducho, a Florentine painter, who, when quite a boy, was brought to Spain in 1585, by his brother Bartolomé, and died there in 1638, having risen to considerable eminence in his art. In 1634, he published, at Madrid, “Diálogos de la Pintura, su Defensa, Orígen,” etc. (4to, 229 leaves); but the _licencias_ are dated 1632 and 1633. It is written in good plain prose, without particular merit as to style, and is declared by Cean Bermudez, (Diccionario, Tom. I. p. 251,) in his notice of the author, to be “el mejor libro que tenemos de pintura en Castellano.” At the end is an Appendix, in which are attacks of Lope de Vega, Juan de Jauregui, and others, on a duty laid upon pictures, which, Cean Bermudez says, “the efforts of Carducho and his friends succeeded in removing in 1637.” During the period embraced by the works last mentioned, a false taste had invaded Spanish prose. It was the same unhappy taste which we have noticed in Spanish poetry by the name of “Gongorism,” but which its admirers called sometimes “the polite,” and sometimes “the cultivated,” style of writing. Traces of it have been sought in the sixteenth century among some of the best writers of the country; but for this there seems no foundation, except in the fact, that a rigorous taste never at any time prevailed in Spain, and that the luxuriant success of letters towards the end of the reign of Philip the Second, and the consequent difficulty of obtaining fashionable distinction by authorship, had led to occasional affectations even in the style of those who, like Cervantes and Mariana, stood foremost among the better writers of their time.