Note 40 — Chapter VII

Pinto gives a long account of this dispute, which has been substantially adopted by Lucina, the Portuguese biographer of Xavier, whose life of the saint was published in 1600, and who, in composing it, had the use of Pinto’s yet unpublished manuscript. Tursellini’s Latin biography of Xavier was published at Rome and Antwerp, 1596. From these was compiled the French life, by Bouhours, which our Dryden translated. Tursellini published also four books of Xavier’s epistles, translated into Latin. Eight books of new epistles afterwards appeared. Charlevoix remarks of them, “that they are memoirs, of which it is not allowable to question the sincerity, but which furnish very little for history, which was not the writer’s object.” They are chiefly homilies.