It is a spirited book, earnest in the cause of Castile against Catalonia; but still, notwithstanding its partisan character, it is, the most valuable of the contemporary accounts of the events to which it relates; and, notwithstanding it has a good deal of the lively air of the French memoirs, then so much in fashion, it is strongly marked with the old Spanish feelings of religion and loyalty,--feelings which this very book proves to have partly survived the general decay of the national character during the seventeenth century, and the convulsions that had shaken it at the opening of the eighteenth. In style it is not perfectly pure. Perhaps tokens of its author’s Sardinian education are seen in his choice of words; and certainly his pointed epigrammatic phrases and sentences often show, that he leaned to the rhetorical doctrines of Gracian, of whom, in his narrative poem, we see that he had once been a thorough disciple. But the Commentaries are, after all, a pleasant book, and abound in details, given with much modesty where their author is personally concerned, and with a picturesqueness which belongs only to the narrative of one who has been an actor in the scenes he describes.[294] [294] “Los Tobias, su Vida escrita en Octavas, por D. Vicente Bacallar y Sanna, Marques de San Phelipe,” etc., 4to, pp. 178, without date, but licensed 1709.--“Monarchia Hebrea,” Madrid, 1727, 2 tom. 4to.--“Comentarios de la Guerra de España hasta el Año 1725,” Genoa, no date, 2 tom. 4to. Of the last there is a poor continuation, bringing the history down to 1742, entitled, “Continuacion á los Comentarios, etc., por D. Joséph del Campo Raso,” Madrid, 1756-63, 2 tom. 4to. But, when we speak of Spanish literature in the reign of Philip the Fifth, we must never forget that the influence of France was gradually becoming felt in all the culture of the country. The mass of the people, it is true, either took no cognizance of the coming change, or resisted it; and the new government willingly avoided whatever might seem to offend or undervalue the old Castilian spirit. But Paris was then, as it had long been, the most refined capital in Europe; and the courts of Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth, necessarily in intimate relations with that of Philip the Fifth, could not fail to carry to Madrid a tone which was already spreading of itself into Germany and the extreme North. French, in fact, soon began to be spoken in the elegant society of the capital and the court;--a thing before unknown in Spain, though French princesses had more than once sat on the Spanish throne. But now it was a compliment to the reigning monarch himself, and courtiers strove to indulge in it. Pitillas, under pretence of laughing at himself for following the fashion, ridicules the awkwardness of those who did so, when he says,