[135] “Leon Prodigioso, Apología Moral, por el Licenciado Cosmé Gomez Texada de los Reyes,” Madrid, 1670, 4to;--“Segunda Parte del Leon Prodigioso, Entendimiento y Verdad, Amantes Filosóficos,” Alcalá, 1673, 4to. The first part was licensed in 1634. The author published “El Filósofo,” a miscellany on the physical sciences and moral philosophy, in 1650. In the “Leon Prodigioso” is a good deal of poetry; particularly, in the first part, a poem called “La Nada,” which is very dull, and one in the second, called “El Todo,” which is still worse. His ridicule of the _culto_ style, in Parte I. pp. 317, 391-395, is acute and successful. Quite different from both of them, “The New Kings of Toledo,” by Christóval Lozano, introduces only real personages, and contains little but the facts of known history and old tradition, slightly embellished by the spirit of romance. Its author was attached to the metropolitan cathedral of Toledo, and, with Calderon, served in the chapel set apart for the burial of the New Kings, as the monarchs of Castile were called from the time of Henry of Trastamara, who there established for himself a cemetery, separate from that in which the race ending with the dishonored Don Pedro had been entombed. The pious chaplain, who was thus called to pray daily for the souls of the line of sovereigns that had constituted the house of Trastamara, determined to illustrate their memories by a romantic history; and, beginning with the old national traditions of the origin of Toledo, the cave of Hercules, the marriage of Charlemagne with a Moorish princess whom he converted, and the refusal of a Christian princess to marry a Moor whom she could not convert, he gives us an account of the building of the chapel, and the adventures of the kings who sleep under its altars, down as late as the death of Henry the Third, in 1406. From internal evidence, it was written at the end of the reign of Philip the Fourth, when Spanish prose had lost much both of its purity and of its dignity; but Lozano, though not free from the affectations of his age, wrote so much more simply than his contemporaries generally did, and his story, though little indebted to his own invention, was yet found so attractive, that, in about half a century, eleven editions of it were published, and it obtained for itself a place in Spanish literature which it has never entirely lost.[136] [136] My copy is of the eleventh edition, Madrid, 1734, 4to; and Lib. III. c. 1, p. 237, was written just at the moment of the accession of Charles II. The story is connected with the favorite doctrine of the Spanish Church: that of the immaculate conception, whose annunciation by the Madonna is described with dramatic effect in Lib. I. c. 10. The earliest edition I have seen noticed is of 1667.