Much of the historical writing of the great epoch--the histories of religious orders, of which there are many, and of towns, of which there not a few, and genealogical histories, also numerous and valuable--does not, properly speaking, belong to literature. But it would be a very pedantic interpretation of the word which would exclude the _Comentario de la Guerra de Alemaña_[47] of Luis de Ávila y Zuñiga. It is an account of the war of the Smalkaldian League, written by an eyewitness who served the emperor, and attended him in his retirement at Yuste. The merit of this, and many other books of the same order, lies less in any beauty of style they possess than in the interest which attaches to the evidence of capable men who saw great events. Luis de Ávila is also valuable because he gives expression to that pride and ambition of the emperor’s Spanish followers, who really dreamt that they were helping towards the establishment of a universal empire. Another writer of the same stamp, who lived when the fortune of Spain had reached its height and was beginning to turn, was Don Bernardino de Mendoza, a most typical Spaniard of his time. He was a soldier of the school of the Duke of Alva, a cavalry officer of distinction, was ambassador in England some years before the Armada, and in France during that great passage in history. He died at a great age, blind and “in religion,” having lived the full life of a fighting pious Spaniard who could use both sword and pen. He wrote commentaries on the war in the Low Countries between 1566 and 1577, and a treatise on the _Theory and Practice of War_. The commentaries were published in 1592. The treatise had appeared in 1577. The great subject of the Low Country wars of a somewhat later period--1588-1599--was also treated by another Spaniard of the same stamp as Don Bernardino. This was Don Carlos Coloma, Marquis of Espinar, who also was both soldier, diplomatist (he came on an embassy to England in the reign of James I.), and man of letters. Besides his _Guerras de los Paises Bajos_ he made a translation of Tacitus. [SN: _Early Historians of the Indies._]