Note 248 — Chapter XXXIX

“Obras y Dias, Manual de Señores y Príncipes, por Juan Eusebio Nieremberg,” Madrid, 1629, 4to, ff. 220. His father and mother were Germans, who came to Spain with the Empress of Austria, Doña Maria, but he himself was born at Madrid in 1595, and died there in 1658. Antonio (Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 686) and Baena (Tom. III. p. 190) give long lists of his works, chiefly in Latin. The “Contemplations on the State of Man,” published in 1684, seventeen years after the death of Jeremy Taylor, as his work, turns out to have been substantially taken from a treatise of Nieremberg, first published as early as 1654, and entitled “Diferencia de lo Temporal y Eterno”; the “Contemplations,” however, being a rifacimento of an English translation of the work of Nieremberg, by Sir Vivian Mullineaux, published in 1672. (See an interesting pamphlet on this subject, “Letter to Joshua Watson, Esq., etc., by Edw. Churton, M. A., Archdeacon of Cleveland,” London, 1848, 8vo.) Why the fraud was not earlier detected, since Heber and others had noted the difference between the style of this work and that of Bishop Taylor’s works generally, it is difficult to tell. The treatise of Nieremberg has always been valued in Spanish, and, besides being early translated into Latin, Italian, French, and English, was published in Arabic in 1733-34, at the Convent of St. John, on the Mountain of the Druses. See Brunet.