Maximilian Deza, an Italian, was born in 1610, and joined the Congregation of the Mother of God, in which he soon became famous as a preacher. He seems to have been a man of fervent piety and Apostolic zeal. He had acquired a good knowledge of the Latin classics in his early years, and this he was fond of exhibiting, with some pedantry, in his discourses. But such was the taste of the times, when classic literature and art were deluging Europe, and producing a revulsion in all the laws of taste which had regulated the mediævals. This affectation of classic learning was the bane of Deza’s oratory, and it is constantly obtruding itself on the reader, in a marked and offensive manner, though nowhere perhaps so prominently as in his sermon at the marriage of the Queen of Poland with the Duke of Lorraine, in the Cathedral of Neustadt in Austria, in which sermon, for instance, he enumerates celebrated marriages, as those of Cadmus and Harmonia, Jupiter and Juno, David and Michal, Isaac and Rebecca, and that at Cana—all in one breath. As soon as his fame was established, he was in request throughout his native land, and we find him preaching at Bonona, Turin, and Milan. In 1664 he preached before the Doge at Genoa; in 1666 he was in Malta. We have sermons of his delivered at Rome in 1672, and at Venice in 1686. There is extant a sermon by Deza on the birth of the Prince of Wales, the so-called “Pretender,” son of James II., and an oration preached at Venice on the occasion of the exhibition of the Blessed Sacrament for obtaining success against the Turks, with whom the Republic was then at war. Maximilian Deza was sent for by Leopold I. to preach before him at Vienna, and there the old man died peacefully in his seventy-seventh year, A.D. 1687. His sermons were published in Italian, “Prediche dell’ Avvento del P. Massimiliano Deza, Lucchese della Congregatione della Madre di Dio,” by Nicolo Pezzana, Venice, 1709. There is also a Latin edition, translated by Cassimir Moll, a Benedictine, published by Veith, Vienna, 1726, and dedicated to John Julius de Moll, Archbishop of Salzburg. The sermons extant form three series; the first consists of sermons from the First Sunday in Advent to the Sunday after Christmas, together with two discourses on the parable of the Prodigal Son, in all nine, forming one volume. The second contains thirty-eight sermons preached during Lent; and the third part, which is immeasurably inferior to the other two, consists of orations on divers saints, such as St. Catharine of Bologna, St. Peter of Alcantara, St. Rosa of Lima, together with sermons on state occasions.