Note 1283 — Chapter VIII

‘Hardly a convent or a saint of any note in Spain, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, failed of especial commemoration; and each of the religious orders and great cathedrals had at least one historian, and most of them several. The number of books on Spanish ecclesiastical history, is, therefore, one that may well be called enormous.’ Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature, vol. iii. p. 132. Forner assures us, somewhat needlessly, of what no one ever doubted, that ‘los estudios sagrados jamas decayéron en España.’ Forner, Oracion Apologética, Madrid, 1786, p. 141.