Note 567 — Chapter XVII

One of the most valuable monuments of the old dialects of Spain is a translation of the Bible into Catalan, made by Bonifacio Ferrer, who died in 1477, and was the brother of St. Vincent Ferrer. It was printed at Valencia, in 1478, (folio,) but the Inquisition came so soon to suppress it, that it never exercised much influence on the literature or language of the country; nearly every copy of it having been destroyed. Extracts from it and sufficient accounts of it may be found in Castro, Bib. Española, (Tom. I. pp. 444-448,) and McCrie’s “Reformation in Spain” (Edinburgh, 1829, 8vo, pp. 191 and 414). Sismondi, at the end of his discussion of the Provençal literature, in his “Littérature du Midi de l’Europe,” has some remarks on its decay, which in their tone are not entirely unlike those in the last pages of this chapter, and to which I would refer both to illustrate and to justify my own.