Jovellanos left behind him few men, in any country, of a greater elevation of mind, and fewer still of a purer or more irreproachable character. Whatever he did was for Spain and his fellow-men, to whose service he devoted himself alike in the days of his happiness and of his suffering;--in his influence over the school of Salamanca, when he exhorted them to raise the tone of their poetry, no less than in the war-cry of his odes to cheer on his countrymen in their conflict for national independence;--in his patient counsels for the cause of education, when he was an exile in Asturias or a prisoner in Majorca, no less than in the exercise of his authority as a magistrate and a minister of state to Charles the Fourth, and as the head of the government at Seville. He lived, indeed, in times of great trouble, but his virtues were equal to the trials that were laid upon them, and when he died, in a wretched and comfortless inn, he had the consolation of believing that Spain would be successful in the struggle he had assisted to lead on, and of knowing, in his own heart, what the Cortes afterwards declared to the world, that he was “a man well deserving of his country.”[360] [360] “Coleccion de las Obras de Don Gaspar Melchior de Jovellanos,” Madrid, 1830-32, 7 tom. 8vo. A declamatory prose satire on the state of Spain in the time of Charles IV., supposed to have been delivered in the Amphitheatre of Madrid, in 1796, has been attributed to Jovellanos. It is entitled “Pan y Toros,” or Bread and Bull-fights, from the old Roman cry of “Panem et Circenses,” and was suppressed as soon as it was published, but has often been printed since. Among other distinctions, it enjoyed the singular one of being translated and privately printed, in 1813, on board a British man-of-war, stationed in the Mediterranean. But it is not the work of Jovellanos, though it has almost always borne his name on the successive editions. Jovellanos was familiar with English literature, and translated the first book of the “Paradise Lost,” but not very successfully. For notices of him, see Memorias de Jovellanos, por Don Agustin Cean Bermudez, Madrid, 1814, 12mo; the Life at the end of his collected Works; Lord Holland’s Life of Lope de Vega, 1817, Tom. II., where is a beautiful tribute to him, worthy of Mr. Fox’s nephew; and Llorente, Tom. II. p. 540, and Tom. IV. p. 122, where are recorded some of his shameful persecutions. The name of Jovellanos is sometimes written Jove Llanos; and, I believe, was always so written by his ancestors.