Note 181 — Chapter XIV · SOME ECCLESIASTICS AND THEIR RELIGIOUS BOOKS
Reading edition
“I was born in Quito in a humble dwelling, my mother not having swaddling clothes in which to wrap me; as my father had gone to Spain, I became a friar, without having the spirit of a friar; I became vain, and although I studied much, I had less knowledge than was attributed to me by others.”
Villaroel’s letter containing this statement was dated at Arequipa August 8, 1654, and is printed in El suelo de Arequipa convertido en cielo, by Dr. Ventura Trabada. This work is now available in print in Odriozola’s Documentos literarios del Perú, X, 1-324. It contains an account of the foundation of Arequipa, the cathedral, and the monasteries, and describes the lives of the bishops and other noted ecclesiastics, who have lived and laboured in the city. Among less important works, there appeared about the middle of the seventeenth century Epítome de la vida y muerte del ilustrísimo señor doctor don Bernardino de Almansa ... Arzobispo de Santafé de Bogotá, by Pedro de Solís y Valenzuela, published in Lima in 1646; Lengua eucarística del hombre bueno, by Cristóbal de Torres, issued in Madrid in two folio volumes, containing an exposition of the doctrines of Thomas Aquinas; and various other purely religious works by Torres.