[331] Vida de Isla, p. 63. Llorente, Hist., Tom. II. p. 450. Cartas Familiares de Isla, Tom. II. pp. 168, etc., and Tom. III. p. 213. There are several amusing letters about Fray Gerundio in the second volume of the Cartas Familiares. The Inquisition (Index, 1790) not only forbade the work itself, but forbade any body to publish any thing for or _against_ it. The second volume did not fare so well. After the censure passed on the first, it could not, of course, be licensed, and so remained for a long time in manuscript, a forbidden book. In fact, it first appeared in England, and in the English language, in 1772, through the agency of Baretti, to whom the original had been sent after its author had gone to Italy. But an edition of the whole work in Spanish soon appeared at Bayonne, followed by other editions in other places; and, though it was never licensed at home till 1813,--and then only to be forbidden anew the next year, on the return of Ferdinand the Seventh,--still few books have been better known, all over Spain, to the more intelligent classes of the Spanish people, than Friar Gerund, from the day of its first publication to the present time. What is of more consequence, it was, from the first, successful in its main purpose. The _sobriquet_ of Friar Gerund was given at once to those who indulged in the vulgar style of preaching it was intended to discountenance, and any one who was admitted to deserve the appellation could no longer collect an audience, except such as was gathered from the populace of the public squares.[332] [332] Watt, Bibliotheca, art. _Isla._ Wieland, Teutsche Merkur, 1773, Tom. III. p. 196. Baretti’s Proposals for Printing the Translation of Friar Gerund, prefixed to that work, London, 1772, 2 tom. 8vo. In consequence of the alarm and anxieties that accompanied his sudden and violent expulsion from Spain, in 1767, Father Isla suffered on the road an attack of paralysis, which made his health uncertain for the remaining fourteen years of his life. Still, after his death, it was found that in these sad years he had not been idle. Among his papers was a poem in sixteen cantos, containing above twelve thousand lines in octave stanzas. It is called “Cicero,” and claims to be a life of the great Roman orator. But it is no such thing. It is a satire on the vices and follies of the author’s own time, begun in Spain, but chiefly written during his exile in Italy; and, though it contains occasional sketches of an imaginary life of Cicero’s mother, they are very inconsiderable, and, as for Cicero himself, the poem leaves him in his cradle, only eighteen months old.