The person, however, who settled its character, and in some respects gave it an air of philosophical pretension, was Balthazar Gracian, a Jesuit of Aragon, who lived between 1601 and 1658; exactly the period when the cultivated style took possession of Spanish prose, and rose to its greatest consideration. He began in 1630, by a tract called “The Hero,” which is not so much the description of a hero’s character as it is a recipe to form one, given in short, compact sentences, constructed in the new style. It was successful, and was followed by five or six other works, written in the same manner; after which, to confirm and justify them all, there appeared, in 1648, his “Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio”; a regular Art of Poetry, or rather system of rhetoric, accommodated to the school of Góngora, and showing great acuteness, especially in the ingenuity with which the author presses into his service the elder poets, such as Diego de Mendoza, the Argensolas, and even Luis de Leon and the Bachiller de la Torre. The most remarkable work of Gracian, however, is his “Críticon,” published in three parts, between 1650 and 1653. It is an allegory on human life, and gives us the adventures of Critilus, a noble Spaniard, wrecked on the desert island of Saint Helena, where he finds a solitary savage, who knows nothing about himself, except that he has been nursed by a wild beast. After much communication in dumb show, they are able to understand each other in Spanish, and, being taken from the island, travel together through the world, talking often of the leading men of their time in Spain, but holding intercourse more with allegorical personages than with one another. The story of their adventures is long, and its three portions represent the three periods of human life; the first being called the Spring of Childhood, the second the Autumn of Manhood, and the third the Winter of Old Age. In some parts it shows much talent; and eloquent discussions on moral subjects, and glowing descriptions of events and natural scenery, can be taken from it, which are little infected with the extravagances of the Cultivated Style. Sometimes, we are reminded of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,”--as, for instance, in the scenes of the World’s Fair,--and might almost say, that the “Críticon” is to the Catholic religion and the notions of life in Spain during the reign of Philip the Fourth, what Bunyan’s fiction is to Puritanism and the English character in the age of Cromwell. But there is no vitality in the shadowy personages of Gracian. He bodies nothing forth to which our sympathies can attach themselves as they do to such sharply-defined creations as Christian and Mr. Greatheart, and, when we are moved at all by him, it is only by his acuteness and eloquence.