The great name of Spanish historical literature is that of Juan de Mariana,[52] the Jesuit, whose name once rang all over Europe for his defence of regicide in the treatise _De Rege_, written for the benefit of his pupil, Philip III. But this and his other treatises were written in Latin, and never translated by himself. His place in Spanish literature is due to his history. Mariana was of the most humble birth, for he was a foundling. He was born at Talavera in 1536, and educated by the Jesuits, in whose college in Sicily he taught for many years; but his later life was spent in the house of his order at Toledo. His troubles with his superiors form a not very honourable passage in the history of the Jesuits. The first purpose of his great work was to make Europe acquainted with the past of Spain, and he wrote in Latin, the universal language of scholarship. Twenty of the thirty books were published in that language in 1572. But, unlike Bacon, Mariana did not believe that the learned language would outlive the modern tongues. He was induced to make a Castilian version of his own Latin, and when doing it he took the freedom which even the most strict critic will allow to belong to the translator of his own work. He enlarged, corrected, and amended, till the Castilian history, which appeared in 1601, was almost a new work. Four editions, further enlarged and amended, appeared before the author’s death in 1623. In answering a minute critic, Mariana, with an audacity not perhaps to be excused, declared that if he had stopped to verify every small fact, Spain would have waited for ever for a history. This bold avowal of his indifference to the tithings of mint and anise illustrates sufficiently the spirit in which he wrote. He was not a historical scholar in the same sense as Zurita--a minute student of original records--but a man of great learning and high patriotic spirit, who applied himself to the making of a work of literature worthy of the past of his country. The defects of the history are patent, and one of them is a mere matter of change of fashion. He took Livy for a model, and therefore put long speeches into the mouths of his personages. This, however, was a mere literary convention not intended to deceive anybody, and not likely to mislead the most uncritical reader. It was only a now disused way of giving what the modern historian would give in comment and illustration. The same following of Livy led him into including in his history, and presenting as history, a great deal of what he knew to be legend, simply because it was picturesque and familiar. Against these defects, which from the literary point of view are no defects at all, are to be put a fine style quite uncontaminated by the usual defects of Spanish prose, a great power of narrative, and then this, that Mariana gave the history of his country throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages in a lofty patriotic spirit, which may not interpret and explain