Note 790 — Chapter XXVII

“La Carolea,” Valencia, 1560, 2 tom. 12mo. The first volume ends with accounts of the author’s birthplace, in the course of which he commemorates some of its merchants and some of its scholars, particularly Luis Vives. Notices of Sempere are to be found in Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 135, in Fuster, Tom. I. p. 110, and in the notes to Polo’s “Diana,” by Cerdá, p. 380.

A poem entitled “Conquista de la Nueva Castilla,” first published at Paris in 1848, 12mo, by J. A. Sprecher de Bernegg, may, perhaps, be older than the “Carolea.” It is a short narrative poem, in two hundred and eighty-three octave stanzas, apparently written about the middle of the sixteenth century, by some unknown author of that period, and devoted to the glory of Francisco Pizarro, from the time when he left Panamá, in 1524, to the fall of Atabalipa. It was found in the Imperial Library at Vienna, among the manuscripts there, but, from a review of it in the Jahrbücher der Literatur, Band CXXI., 1848, it seems to have been edited with very little critical care. It does not, however, deserve more than it received. It is wholly worthless;—not better than we can easily suppose to have been written by one of Pizarro’s rude followers.