Note 830 — Chapter V

Escobar complains that many of the questions sent to him were in such bad verse, that it cost him a great deal of labor to put them into a proper shape; and it must be admitted, that both questions and answers generally read as if they came from one hand. Sometimes a long moral dissertation occurs, especially in the prose of the second volume, but the answers are rarely tedious from their length. Those in the first volume are the best, and Nos. 280, 281, 282, are curious, from the accounts they contain of the poet himself, who must have died after 1552. In the Preface to the first volume, he says the Admiral died in 1538. If the whole work had been completed, according to its author’s purpose, it would have contained just a thousand questions and answers. For a specimen, we may take No. 10 (Quatrocientas Preguntas, Çaragoça, 1545, folio) as one of the more ridiculous, where the Admiral asks how many keys Christ gave to St. Peter, and No. 190 as one of the better sort, where the Admiral asks, whether it be necessary to kneel before the priest at confession, if the penitent finds it very painful; to which the old monk answers gently and well,—

The fifth part of the first volume consists of riddles in the old style; and, as Escobar adds, they are sometimes truly very old riddles; so old, that they must have been generally known. The second volume was printed at Valladolid, 1552, and both are in folio.