Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/506

 490 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. was short and fat, and unduly fond of women and of eating. His astrological learning was ridiculed in the saying that he knew much of heaven and little of earth. He left his wife and gave up his earldom of Tineo in order to obtain the mastership of the Order of Calatrava, but the king soon deprived him of it, and thus, in the words of the chronicler, he lost both. After his death, at the age of fifty, in 1431, the King Juan II. ordered all his books to be examined by Fray Lope de Barrientos, afterwards Bishop of Cuenca, a professor of Salamanca and tutor of the Infante Enrique. A portion of them Fray Lope burned publicly on the plaza of the Dominican convent of Madrid, where the marquis lay buried. He kept the rest — probably to aid him in the books on the occult sciences which he wrote at command of the king. Don Enrique evidently was a man of culture despised by a bar- barous age which could see in his varied accomplishments only the magic skill so suggestive to the popular imagination. He was no vulgar magician. In his commentary on the iEneid he speaks of magic as a forbidden science, of whose forty different varieties he gives a curious classification. The only one of his writings that has reached us on a topic of the kind is a treatise on the evil eye. In common with his age he regards this as an admitted fact, but he attributes it to natural causes ; and in the long and learned cata- logue of remedies employed by different races from ancient times, he counsels abstinence from those which savor of superstition and are forbidden by the Church. Had he seriously devoted himself to the occult sciences he would scarce have written his " Art of Carving," which was printed in 1766. In this work he not only gives the most minute directions for carving all manner of flesh, fowls, fish, and fruits, but gravely proposes that there shall be a school for training youth of gentle blood in this indispensable accomplishment, with privileges and honors to reward the most efficient graduates. Yet of this unworldly scholar, neglected and despised during life, popular exaggeration speedily made a magician of wondrous power. His legend grew until there was nothing too wild to be attributed to him. He caused himself to be cut up and packed in a flask with certain conjurations, so as to become immortal; he rendered himself invisible with the herb Andromeda ; he turned the sun blood-red with the stone heliotrope ; he brought rain and