Castilla was a gentleman apparently of the old national type, descended from an illegitimate branch of the family of Pedro el Cruel. He lived in the time of Charles V., and passed his youth near the person of that great sovereign; but, as he says in a letter to his brother, the Bishop of Calahorra, he at last “withdrew himself, disgusted alike with the abhorred rabble and senseless life of the court,” and “chose the estate of matrimony, as one more safe for his soul and better suited to his worldly condition.” How he fared in this experiment he does not tell us; but, missing, in the retirement it brought with it, those pleasures of social intercourse to which he had been accustomed, he bought, as he says, “with a small sum of money, other surer and wiser friends,” whose counsels and teachings he put into verse, that his weak memory might the better preserve them. The result of this life merely contemplative was a book, in which he gives us, first, his “Theórica de Virtudes,” or an explanation, in the old short Spanish verse, accompanied with a prose gloss, of the different Virtues, ending with the vengeful Nemesis; next, a Treatise on Friendship, in long nine-line stanzas; and then, successively, a Satire on Human Life and its vain comforts; an Allegory on Worldly Happiness; a series of Exhortations to Virtue and Holiness, which he has unsuitably called Proverbs; and a short discussion, in _décimas_, on the Immaculate Conception. At the end, separately paged, as if it were quite a distinct treatise, we have a counterpart to the “Theórica de Virtudes,” called the “Prática de las Virtudes de los Buenos Reyes de España”; a poem in above two hundred octave stanzas, on the Virtues of the Kings of Spain, beginning with Alaric the Goth and ending with the Emperor Charles V., to whom he dedicates it with abundance of courtly flattery. The whole volume, both in the prose and verse, is written in the strong old Castilian style, sometimes encumbered with learning, but oftener rich, pithy, and flowing. The following stanza, written, apparently, when its author was already disgusted with his court life, but had not given it up, may serve as a specimen of his best manner:-- Nunca tanto el marinero Desseo llegar al puerto Con fortuna; Ni en batalla el buen guerrero Ser de su victoria cierto Quando puña; Ni madre al ausente hijo Por mar con tanta aficion Le desseo, Como haver un escondrijo Sin contienda en un rincon Desseo yo. f. 45. b.