His _General History of the Deeds of the Castilians in the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea_ was published in 1601-1615 at Madrid. While compiling this great book, the most valuable part of his work, Herrera was also engaged in drawing up a _General History of the World in the time of our Lord the King Philip II._, and other treatises, which are, in fact, statements on behalf of the Government, and have in historical literature something like the place of the yearly summaries in the old _Annual Register_. Herrera’s style was businesslike, but he can never have been read for the pleasure of reading him. With these writers may be placed the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1540-1616), an attractive and rather pathetic figure. His father was one of the _conquistadores_, and his mother belonged to the sacred Inca race. The son was almost equally proud of his pedigree on both sides. The Inca Garcilaso, as he is always called, did some other literary work, including a translation of the once famous _Dialogues on Love by Leon Hebreo_, an echo of the Florentine Platonists, written in Italian by the exiled Spanish Jew, Juda Abarbanel, but he is best known by the _Commentaries on Peru_. In this work, published in two parts in 1609 and 1617, he contrived to reconcile a genuine Christian zeal and an equally genuine Castilian pride of descent with a tender memory of his mother’s people. Garcilaso, though weak and garrulous, is touching, and his commentaries have been the great storehouse of the more poetic legends told of the Incas.[51] Though writers who recorded what they had seen, and others who only recorded what had happened in their time, or near it, cannot be wholly classed together, yet the authors named above have certain qualities in common. Of those mentioned here, almost all wrote in a straightforward manly fashion, with little straining after effect, and a manifest desire to tell the truth. There is little in them of that overweening arrogance which has become associated with the character of the Spaniard. There is no want of pride, which was, indeed, amply justified by the stories they had to tell, but little of the vanity so common in the time of Spain’s decadence. [SN: _Mendoza, Moncada, and Melo._]