Note 282 — Chapter I

The “Ortografía de la Lengua Castellana,” (Mexico, 1609, 4to, ff. 83) is a pleasant and important treatise, which, as the novelist intimates, he began to write in Castile and finished in Mexico. It proposes to reverse the letter ↄ in order to express the soft ch as in mucho, to be printed muↄo; uses two forms of the letter r; writes the conjunction y always i, as Salvá now insists it should be; and claims j, ll, and ñ to be separate letters, as they have long been admitted to be.

In speaking of Aleman, I am reminded of his “San Antonio de Padua,” printed in 12mo, at Valencia, in 1607, ff. 309. It belongs to the same class of books with the “San Patricio” of Montalvan, (see, ante, Vol. II. p. 298,) but is more elaborate and more devout. The number of the Saint’s miracles that it records is very great. Whether he invented any of them for the occasion, I do not know; but they sometimes read as much like novelas as some of his stories in the “Guzman” do, and are always written in the same idiomatic and unadulterated Castilian. It is introduced by a cancion in honor of it by Lope de Vega; but I cannot find that it was ever reprinted;—why, it is difficult to say, for it is an uncommonly attractive book of its class.