XVIII A Prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition
I — Novedades
The poetry of Luis de León is not voluminous; he has no great variety of theme; he sings “the quiet life of him who shuns the world’s uproar;” but there is, as has been said, scarcely a line of it that is not exquisite. And if, as a lyric poet, Luis de León stands in the front of Spanish literature, as a writer of eloquent and well-moulded Castilian prose he has had few equals. His “Nombres de Cristo” is one of the masterpieces of the Spanish language. The sentences are perhaps occasionally too prolix, lengthening out in a rich profusion of words and images. He had, as Ticknor said, a Hebrew soul, and he delighted in similes. It is indeed partly this that gives to his style a colour and a sound which rank him among the greatest prose-writers of any age. But as a writer Luis de León is too well known to need comment. And to himself his literary works were of a secondary importance, and held a subordinate place in his strenuous and energetic life. Born in 1527, of a well-known family at Belmonte in La Mancha, he was sent by his father at the age of fourteen to the University of Salamanca with the advice to “follow the common opinion in letters, que siguiese la opinión comun en las letras.” The precept was not unneeded in that age, for the Reformation had unhinged men’s beliefs and left them a prey to many fears. Intolerance on the side of reformers was answered by fresh intolerance. In Spain one might least expect any dissent from the accepted religion. Even in Spain, however, the general ferment of the rest of Europe had found an echo, the spirit of doubt and inquiry had penetrated to the Spanish Universities, and men’s minds were opening to new lines of thought. There was indeed ample scope for reform. Scholasticism had become a dry and stilted system, well qualified to call down ridicule on all learning. Its professors delighted in hairsplitting and quibbles. Luis de León speaks with a scathing sarcasm of the type of professor who said that he was... “content with a knowledge of St. Thomas and the Saints... and had no wish for any new learning (novedades);” of those who “flatter themselves and fancy that, because they have in their rooms a score of books covered with dust, and have obtained the degree of master of arts, they have well earned the name of men of letters, and may for the rest give themselves up quite securely to sleep and good living... and they consider that the mere fact of having the books and dipping into some part of them once a year bestows on them a knowledge of St. Thomas and the Saints.” But the new spirit of inquiry and reform led those who belonged to the old school to fence themselves the more closely with narrow and bigoted beliefs, to cling to conventionalities of dogma, and to cry out on the most innocent innovations. Violent attacks on Scholasticism had the effect of showing more moderate attempts at reform in an odious light. Suspicions were everywhere rife, and it required no little care to avoid the accusation of being anxious for “new things.” The highest ecclesiastics were not exempt from attack. Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo, had spent a certain number of years in England. In 1556 he had visited Oxford and found it Catholic, la encontró católica, but in the following year at Cambridge he burnt many heretical books and English Bibles. On his return to Spain he was thought to have been contaminated by contact with so many heretics, though he boasted that he had done more than any other in discovering them.
II — Salamanca University
In the Universities especially accusations of every kind hung fire over men marked out by their position or abilities. The University of Salamanca had always been eminently conservative. Popes and Kings were anxious for its welfare. Philip II. saw in the University a stronghold of religion and loyalty. Pedro Chacon tells how “in the year 1560, on the return of our sovereign Don Philip to Spain after an absence of several years spent in reducing and governing the kingdom of England, he at once confirmed all the privileges which the University had received from his predecessors.” He intervened personally in the general affairs and particular disputes of the University, and seems to have considered no trouble too great to preserve the ancient purity of its opinions. Luis de León became deeply attached to the University, “the light,” as he said, “not of Spain only, but of all Europe,” and to Salamanca as student and professor he devoted his entire life. He entered the Augustinian order a few months after arriving at Salamanca, and by so doing renounced a very considerable income which he would otherwise have inherited as his father’s eldest son. His success was rapid. He obtained the chair of philosophy, and afterwards that of theology, and this latter chair he still held when he was arrested in the beginning of 1572 and detained for nearly five years in the prison of the Inquisition at Valladolid. The most serious charges against him were that he had translated the Song of Solomon into the vulgar tongue, and that he had depreciated the authority of the Vulgate. But it was a question primarily between two schools of thought in the University, between the rival Greek and Hebrew scholars, between the members of the order of St. Dominic and the members of the order of St. Augustine, and the case only came under the authority of the Inquisition through the denunciations of Luis de León’s enemies, such as León de Castro. León de Castro was a professor of the old school. He was an excellent Latin and Greek scholar, and was possessed of great energy and perseverance. By his learning, and partly by sheer force of character, he had won a position of high authority in the University, and he guarded his authority with a jealous care. Intolerant of opposition, he sought to crush all who by their talents or popularity might throw him into the shade. He wished to reign supreme. He was easily roused to such a pitch of anger that he lost all control of himself; “when engaged in a dispute,” says Luis de León, “he does not know what he is doing or saying.” He was hasty in his judgment of men and opinions, and supplied deficiencies in his own knowledge by a fierce positiveness. It is said that if he found an opinion in the work of a saint or philosopher, he would at once say, “This is the opinion of all the saints, of all the philosophers.” To him the Vulgate was the final and irrefragable authority, and he opposed with the utmost vigour those scholars who went back to the Hebrew original. Such Hebrew scholars he called “Jews,” a name that smelt of fire in that age. (Against Luis de León the accusation was actually brought of being a Jew, and descended from Jews.) If it was shown that the Hebrew text differed from the Vulgate, Castro answered that the Hebrew text had been altered by the “Jews” since the translation had been made. His position was thus impregnable. He would listen to no arguments, but shouted down his opponents. In a narrow age he might persuade himself that in thus asserting his opinions he was doing good service to the Church. His influence was without doubt great, and it needed no little courage to oppose him. Luis de León, however, was not a man to lie flat and love Setebos. He was frank and open by nature, even to rashness and indiscretion, and in his eagerness for reform was not afraid of making enemies. When he took his degree he attacked certain abuses in a Latin speech of Ciceronian violence, and on another occasion he publicly upbraided the Dominicans with the heresies of their order, and the thrust seems to have gone home, for he himself says that they felt it keenly, “sintieronse fieramente.” Above all, he had no sympathy with pedantry and intolerance. It was impossible that two men of characters so different should not come into collision, and in fact the discussions between professors were often marked by boisterous disputes and all the venom of ill-feeling and discourtesy that sometimes strangely enough creeps into the daily life of the learned. On one occasion Luis de León threatened to have Castro’s book—a commentary on Isaiah—burnt by the Inquisition. On this book Castro had spent much trouble and much money, and the threat cut him to the quick, so that he answered that he would have Luis de León himself burnt. And such threats were not empty words, or the thoughtless bickering of an idle hour. That Luis de León had many malignant enemies was amply shown at his trial.
III — In a Valladolid Dungeon
The order of imprisonment was issued on the 26th of February, 1572. His goods were to be confiscated with the exception of a bed and forty ducats to provide for his food in prison. He was to be seized, wherever found, “in church, monastery, or other sacred place,” and he was to bring with him nothing but clothes and linen. A curious clause adds that “beasts of burden to carry him and his bed, etc., are to be provided at the customary price, and the price is not to be raised.” He was thus arrested and conducted to Valladolid. The following description of the prison is given in the trial of Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, who had been confined there some ten years before. “The prison consisted of two rooms, one for him and one for two servants. They were so remote that the Archbishop heard nothing of a fire which broke out on the 21st of September, 1561, and, lasting for a day and a half, consumed more than four hundred houses, some of them close to the secret prison. The stench was so intolerable that they were obliged at times to beg that the doors might be opened, or they would be suffocated. The infection of the place rendered both master and servants seriously ill, and the doctors of the Holy Office reported that it was indispensable to bathe the apartment in pure air morning and evening. In consequence the Inquisitors arranged that a grating should be made in the door, a device which the Archbishop scorned as adding insult to injury. The rooms were not swept... the shutters of the windows were kept closed, and on some days the Archbishop had to light a candle at nine in the morning. The food was brought on broken plates; the sheets served as table-cloth....” In a letter written to Philip II., after two years of imprisonment, the Archbishop says, “I fear and expect death daily, and to this end my treatment seems to have been directed ever since I came here.” The loss of sun and light, and the actual dirtiness and horror of the place must have been utterly repulsive to a man of Luis de León’s temperament. In one of his writings, “La Perfecta Casada,” he says, “Is not cleanliness the fountain head of beauty—the first and greater part of it?” He loved the open air, and was wont to regret the loss of liberty which even his duties as professor at Salamanca entailed. But to the actual and severe hardships to be undergone there was added, for the devout Catholic, the more subtle and indefinite torture of the mind. For he could not be certain that by some involuntary sin he had not incurred degradation in this life, and punishment unceasing in the next, and in the loneliness and gloom of the prison these doubts would often recur. Luis de León acknowledged the full authority of the Inquisition, and his unqualified submission was not forced or hypocritical, but the fruit of a sincere conviction. The extreme clearness of his intellect was his safeguard, and, though he bowed himself in all things to the will of the Church, he was well assured of his own innocence. Shortly after his arrest he drew up a profession of faith, declaring that he lived and died “now and in the future in the faith and belief of the Holy Catholic Church, and confessing his sins con entrañable dolor.” His defence was conducted throughout in a masterly way. During these five years of suffering he showed a fine sincerity and a clearness of argument that remind one very strongly of Pascal. Never was his style more trenchant and lucid, his reasoning more subtle than in the numerous “Unpublished Documents” that have come down to us. On no occasion was the patience and humility of the man more clearly shown. It is a strange reflection that many of these documents, in accordance with the secrecy of the Inquisition’s proceedings, were kept hidden from Luis de León himself, and that he probably never knew, as we know, that he came within a little of being examined upon the rack. In spite of his ingenious and elaborate defence, Luis de León’s trial was a long one, and one must shudder to think of the sufferings and despair of men of weaker metal and less subtle intellect, such as his intimate friend Grajal, who died in prison. The Inquisition proceeded as usual in an extremely slow and thorough fashion. “Recato y secreto,” caution and secrecy, were indeed its watchwords. Witnesses concerning Luis de León’s case were examined in many parts of Spain, and even at Cuzco, in Peru. It were easy to declaim against the cruelty and tyranny of the Inquisition, but on closer view it would seem unjust to lay the blame entirely at its door. The times, as we have noted, called for the utmost vigilance on the part of the upholders of the true and Catholic faith. They might hold themselves bound to investigate with unwearied diligence the most trifling disputes concerning the doctrine of the Church. Already unorthodox books had been filtering into Spain. A translation of the Psalms had been received at Cadiz, and one man alone, a kind of sixteenth-century Borrow, had brought two bales of heretical books to Seville. The life of the bookseller was rendered anxious and difficult by such proceedings. In a letter to the Inquisitors of Valladolid we read: “The booksellers of this town (Salamanca) have received and continue daily to receive bales of books from France and other parts. These they dare not open for sale without permission.” The evil must be stopped before it spread contagion through the country. It may be argued plausibly that the firmness of the Inquisition saved Spain from the religious dissensions that raged so fiercely in France, Germany, and England, nor may it be forgotten that the centuries of the Inquisition’s most rigorous power were the centuries of Spain’s greatest literary glory.
Perhaps the harm of the Inquisition was, rather, not that it affected original thought and research, but that it created in everyday life an intolerable spirit of suspicion and distrust. It was to the animosity of their private enemies that the imprisonment of both Archbishop Carranza and Luis de León was due, and it is difficult to believe in the sincerity of the witnesses who, “without being cited” and “for the discharge of their conscience,” laid their accusations before the Inquisition. In the University of Salamanca there was much prying and spying, fostered by the rivalries and enmity of the professors. The professors were elected by the votes of the students after a public discussion between the candidates on a given theme, and this system naturally led to considerable ill-feeling and many abuses. During discussions in the University there would be always some one on the watch for any specious subject of accusation. Thus, when Luis de León maintained that “marriage was not in itself an evil but only a less blessed state than celibacy,” León de Castro had written it down in order to denounce it to the Inquisition, and in the same way another professor had gone hastily out during a discussion in order to fetch pen and ink. On one occasion, when Zuñiga was in Luis de León’s cell at Salamanca, the latter mentioned a book which his friend, the celebrated Arias Montano, had sent him. Zuñiga thereupon displayed suspicions of Montano which Luis de León resented. A few days afterwards, to quote Luis de León’s own words, “he seemed to me to be still suspicious and, knowing that he was of a morose spirit and ever inclined to see things in their worst light, I said to him laughingly: ‘You are indeed a pessimist; it seems you still think ill of Montano.’ He said, ‘No; of the man I do not think ill, but I am not certain that it is not my duty to denounce the book.’” Luis de León goes on to say that more than two years afterwards he also “had a fit of pessimism, and, considering the number of heretics who had been discovered and were being discovered daily in Spain,” determined himself to lay the matter before the Inquisition—a common way of forestalling an accusation. Again, Medina examined with most holy zeal (con santísimo celo) Luis de León’s lectures and other papers. The result would be all the more fruitful in that he would not omit the notes taken by students at the lectures, and, as Luis de León was well aware, “ignorant students often put a quite wrong interpretation on what the lecturer said.” Medina did, in fact, call a meeting of students in his cell and inquired of them if they had heard or knew of any suspicious or perverted doctrines of Luis de León. Such methods must multiply means of attack and further spin out a trial. Of one witness Luis de León, in his defence, said, “This witness is the Bachelor of Arts Rodríguez, nicknamed ‘Doctor Subtle’ in the University. I think it is he because he says I left him without an answer, and he was the only person of that University with whom this happened. For as he was a man of unsound judgment and sometimes asked impertinent questions and from what he heard and did not understand collected nonsensical answers, I grew angry and called him a fool. And at other times, in order not to become angry and out of humour on his account, I would give him no answer but flee from him. And he is so witless and importunate that I remember trying to escape him both indoors and in the Schools and in the streets, he following and asking absurd questions, I hurrying on without answering, until at last some of my companions or other students would push him aside and hold him back by force.” A little picture of academic life which for vividness it would be hard to surpass. Luis de León, indeed, was not sparing in his criticism of his various accusers. Their names, in accordance with the custom of the Inquisition, were kept from him, but on reading the anonymous accusations, he referred each one to its true author with unfailing judgment and was thus enabled to refute them with a sure hand. Of one of the witnesses who belonged to his own order he said: “He is known among us as a man who never speaks the truth except by accident.” Of another he speaks satirically as “most spiritual,” espiritualísimo, and says that the words “kisses,” “embraces,” “bright eyes,” and other words in the Spanish rendering of the Song of Songs scandalized him; words, that is, which had not struck him when he read them in Latin, shocked him now that they were written in the romance. Luis de León was not unaware that the worst interpretation would be put on his sayings, or reported sayings, and he was led by this fear himself to lay many trivial details before the Inquisition. Thus he confessed that at a lecture “the students furthest from me bade me speak louder, for I was hoarse and they could not hear me well, and I said: ‘I am hoarse and, you know, it is better to speak low that the gentlemen of the Inquisition may not hear.’” He was full of life and humour, and many a chance word spoken in jest might be twisted by the malicious to an uncatholic implication. He felt in prison that he was fighting blindfold against many enemies and asked more than once to be brought face to face with his accusers. “And thus,” he says, “they speak from afar as men in safety and free, while I, blind and in prison, cannot see who is attacking me.” Many absurd charges were brought against him. According to one witness he “always said low mass, even on a feast day, and no one could hear what he said as he mumbled ‘tu, tu, tu,’ and made an end very speedily.” Another accusation seems to have been based on a mere quibble between the words vino, “wine,” and vinó, “came.” For at a dinner some one seems to have asked for wine and Fray Luis to have said that it was doubtful if it had come; but, according to the witness, all understood his answer to refer to the coming of Christ! Another witness said that he was “a very clever theologian, but somewhat bold in his lectures”—a charge less petty than the preceding, but from its vagueness scarcely less ridiculous. In the same spirit Castro “had heard say,” “thought that he had heard”; Medina “thought that he saw in Fray Luis an inclination to new things.” Such charges coming from enemies made his innocence, as he said, “clearer than the light of noon.” Minute points were elaborately dealt with. For instance, the sale of Castro’s book on Isaiah had been spoilt, he said, by the Jews (Luis de León and his friends); according to Luis de León, the real reason of its failure was its size and costliness. As to the accusation of being, in fact, by descent a Jew, it would appear that Fray Luis’ great-grandmother, or rather the second wife of his great-grandfather, was of Jewish origin.
The one serious charge was, indeed, that he did not give due authority to the Vulgate. It is probable that his attitude had been inopportune at a time when the Vulgate was being attacked on all sides by the heretics, and that the numerous students who attended his lectures were apt to exaggerate his doctrine.
And so the trial dragged on. Luis de León began to lose patience. “If only,” he exclaims, “the sun were divided fairly between me and my accusers”—a metaphor borrowed from duelling. He complains frequently of unnecessary delay. He writes to the Inquisitors, “You are delaying the conclusion of my trial without just cause,” “without cause and to the one end of lengthening out my imprisonment, and with the wish to put a term to my life, since you find me without fault.” He begs that there be no more delay “considering the length of time I have been here, and the small cause there was for bringing me here, and the enmity and notorious calumnies that began and occasioned this scandal.” His imprisonment, he says, is “a long, harsh and cruel torment.” Partly constant communications between Valladolid and Madrid caused delay. Thus a request of Fray Luis, made on the 20th of August, did not receive an answer from the Supreme Tribunal at Madrid till the 20th of September. Partly, too, it must be admitted that after the scandal and excitement caused by his imprisonment at Salamanca, where he had a host of friends and followers, it would seem almost as if the Inquisitors were unwilling to release him with the confession that the whole matter had been smoke without a fire; and the longer the trial continued the greater, naturally, would become their embarrassment.
He was allowed some books and a few other articles. Thus he asks for a crucifix, a brass candlestick, a knife, “to cut what I eat,” the works of St. Leon, a Hebrew Bible, a Sophocles in Greek, a Pindar in Greek and Latin, etc. He complains that he is not properly attended, and “it has happened that I have fainted with hunger from having no one to give me food, and I beg that I may be given a monk of my order to serve me if you do not wish to allow me to die alone between four walls.” He was not allowed the use of the Sacraments, and in his frequent illness this was a constant torture. “You persist,” he says, “in keeping me in prison as if I were a heretic, deprived of the use of the Sacraments, with manifest danger to my life and to my soul, though you bring no fresh charge against me.” He therefore begs them, pending the sentence, to “allow me at least a free death among my monks.” Seeing that the conclusion of his case was delayed from day to day he implores, in another petition, to be transported to some monastery in Valladolid that he may die there as a Christian. “This is the only thing that I solicit or desire, since the passion of my enemies and my own sins have taken from me all that one desires in life.”
IV — Ex Forti Dulcedo
On the 28th September, 1576, the sentence is at length pronounced. The majority of the judges “are of opinion that Fray Luis de León be put to the torture as to his meaning, and as to what has been witnessed against him, and as to the propositions that have been noted as heretical, in spite of the fact that the theologians profess finally to be satisfied with them and to give them the meaning that Fray Luis would have them bear; and that the torture to be applied to him be moderate, seeing that the accused is of delicate health; and that the results obtained be then further examined.” This was the verdict of four out of the seven judges; one gave no decision; the remaining two were of opinion that the accused should be reprimanded in the Court of the Holy Office, and that in the general hall of the greater Schools of Salamanca, in the presence of the students and other persons of the University, he should declare his propositions to be suspicious and ambiguous; that he should be forbidden to lecture in the Schools or elsewhere, and that his translation of the Song of Solomon should be prohibited and withdrawn from circulation.
The superior and more impartial tribunal of Madrid quashed the sentence, and Luis de León was not questioned on the rack. It ordered (7th December, 1576) that Fray Luis de León should be acquitted and admonished in the Court of the Holy Office to be careful in future how he treated of matters so dangerous as those implicated in the trial. The sentence pronounced runs as follows: “We find, in accordance with the decrees and on the merits of the said suit, that it is our duty to absolve and we do absolve the said Fray Luis de León from the burden of this trial.” He requested and obtained a declaration that he had been acquitted without penance or stain whatsoever, and was free to exercise all his duties in the University.
Luis de León’s health had never been robust, and the hardships of his imprisonment broke it completely. That he survived is probably due to his fortitude and mystic faith. In a dedication to Cardinal Quiroga, he says: “When I was on trial, owing to the intrigues of certain of my enemies, and was branded as suspicious in the faith, and was cut off not only from the conversation but from the intercourse and very sight of men, and was buried in a prison for five years, in the midst of all this I felt a peace and joyfulness of spirit which I often miss now that I am restored to the light of day and to my friends.”
These years spent in prison were not passed in idleness. Besides the business of his defence, he wrote several of his poems during this time and his long treatise “Los Nombres de Cristo.” Many know his short poem beginning, “Here falsehood and wrong kept me imprisoned,” and ending with the line so often quoted in Spanish literature, “ni envidiado ni envidioso.” And we may refer to this time of his imprisonment such passages as “No pinta el prado aquí la primavera”—
“Here with the spring the meadows are not gay
Nor the clouds golden in the rising sun;
No nightingale pours forth its plaintive lay:
But here the night is sleepless, and the day
Is full of tears and unconsoling sorrow,
And the sad present has a sadder morrow....”
Or the beautiful poem beginning “Virgen que el sol más pura”—
“Virgin purer than the sun,
Glory of mortals, of the heavens light,
Whose pity is not less than thy great might,...”
Without the enforced leisure of these years we cannot doubt that his “Nombres de Cristo” would never have been written, and Spanish prose would have lacked one of its most luminous and brilliant jewels.
Spanish literature owes him a great gratitude for having written in Spanish, contrary to the prejudices of the learned, who held that a writing to be profound must be obscure, and “marvelled that a theologian of whom they expected some great treatise full of deep questions had ended by writing a book in romance.” But Luis de León wished, he says, to open the “new path” of good style, that consists “both in what is said and in the way of saying it, and in the task of choosing the best words of those in common use, and considering the sound of them, and even at times of counting the letters, and weighing and measuring and mingling them, that the matter be presented not only with clearness but with softness and harmony.”
Nearly five years after his arrest Luis de León returned to Salamanca. He returned entirely justified, and the University welcomed him back with rejoicing. Over the Augustinian Order especially his trial had hung like a cloud, and the condemnation of so distinguished a professor must have been felt as a disgrace by the whole University. The legend is well known. When Luis de León resumed his lectures the entire University thronged to hear him. He was enjoined by the Inquisition to preserve complete silence as to its proceedings, but this was an occasion at least for subtle and indirect allusions, and for the excitement of general sympathy. Luis de León rose in the crowded room and began his lecture with the words: “Gentlemen, we were saying yesterday,” and so continued his course. The intervening five years were obliterated. The story is so thoroughly in keeping with the character of the man, whose simplicity and sincere humility produced an effect unattainable by the most studious artifice, that we would willingly maintain its truth. We would thrust aside the prosaic facts that Luis de León did not resume his lectures, the chair having been occupied in his absence, and he acquiescing in this on his return (la daba por bien empleada), and that, when he was assigned another course of lectures, a long dispute arose in the University as to the hour at which he should deliver them. We may say at least that, if the story is not literal in the facts, in spirit it is essentially true. The quaint kind of pulpit from which the words were spoken, and the lecture-room with its rough-hewn benches, are still preserved in the University at Salamanca, and the sublime words, “Decíamos ayer,” form part of the repertoire of the tourist’s cicerone.
Luis de León, on the recovery of his freedom, might exclaim, in the words of the Persiles of Cervantes (Cervantes, who professed himself Luis de León’s “reverent votary and follower,” á quien yo reverencio, adoro y sigo): “I give you thanks, immense and merciful Heavens, that you have brought me to die where your light may look upon my death, and not in the shades of the dark prison-house which I now leave.” He survived for fifteen years, dying on the 23rd of August, 1591, nine days after being promoted from Vicar-General to Provincial of his Order. His good humour and natural gaiety, his unselfishness and common-sense, won for him many and strong friendships—we feel, indeed, that he was a man not without failings, but entirely lovable. He had been commanded by the Inquisitor-General to publish his own works, and was entrusted with the publication of those of Santa Teresa. His second Inquisition trial arose apparently from a lecture on the vexed question of predestination and freewill. It was declared that the University of Salamanca was greatly scandalized at the boldness with which he maintained that the contrary of his own opinion was heresy. The matter, however, ended by his being “benevolently and lovingly admonished” at Toledo. Besides these and many other occupations, he gave ungrudging help to the Carmelite nuns in asserting their independence, which was threatened by a reform sanctioned by Philip II. The Pope, indeed, was favourable to the nuns, but the King opposed the Papal Brief, and Luis de León is reported to have said: “It is impossible to carry out a single order of His Holiness in Spain.” The story that Fray Luis died of grief on account of the King’s anger at this opposition is certainly untrue, although it is likely enough that the King was annoyed. He is said to have exclaimed: “Quien le mete á Frai Luis en estas cosas?—What has Fray Luis to do in this galère?” Luis de León’s life was thus not without many turmoils. But we may like best to think of him, as in the description in his “Nombres de Cristo,” “in the month of June, after the Feast of St. John when the Salamanca term breaks up,” retiring from a long year of work to the country house possessed by his monastery on the banks of the Tormes. There, in the great garden of trees growing without order, with a stream “running and pausing as if in laughter,” and with the winding river Tormes in sight—“a place far better than the professor’s chair”—he would meditate alone or converse with friends “in the cool of the morning, on a day most calm and bright;” “for,” he says elsewhere in the same work, “it may be that in towns there is more refinement of speech, but fineness of sentiment is of the country and of solitude.”