Note 287 — Chapter I

For an account of these Academies, see Guarinos, “Biblioteca”; and for a notice of the origin of the Royal Academy of History, see the first volume of its Memoirs. The old Academias, in imitation of the Italian,—such as are ridiculed in the “Diablo Cojuelo,” Tranco IX.,—had much gone out of fashion and been displaced by the modern Tertulias, where both sexes meet, and which in their turn have been ridiculed in the Saynetes of Ramon de la Cruz and Castillo.