Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/197

Rh Q U E Q U E 179 duke, remained faithful to him in his misfortunes, and bore exile and prison with resignation. On the death of Philip III. (31st March 1621), he recommended himself to the first minister of the new king by celebrating his accession to power and saluting him as the vindicator of public morality in an elegant epistle, in the style of Juvenal, on The Present Habits of the Spaniards. Olivares recalled him from his exile and gave him a charge in the palace, and from this time Quevedo resided almost con- stantly at court, where he acquired a position of great weight, only comparable to that of Voltaire in the France of last century. Like Voltaire, he became a sort of oracle, and exercised in Spain a kind of political and literary jurisdic- tion due to his varied relations and knowledge, but especi- ally to his biting and unbridled wit, which had no respect of persons and laid bare every sore. General politics, social economy, war, finance, literary and religious questions, all fell under his dissecting knife, and he had a dissertation, a pamphlet, or a song for everything. One day he is de- fending St James, the sole patron of Spain, against a powerful coterie that wished to associate St Teresa with him, and meeting these antagonists with the vehemence of a warm patriot and the learning of a professional theo- logian ; next day he is writing against the duke of Savoy, the hidden enemy of Spain, or against the measures taken to change the value of the currency ; or once more he is engaged with the literary school of Gongora, whose affecta- tions and designed obscurity of style seem to him to sin against the genius of the Castilian tongue. And in the midst of this incessant controversy on every possible subject he finds time to compose a comic romance, Don Pablo of Segovia (1626), a masterpiece of sparkling verve and fun, which admirably continues the series of Lazarillo de Tonnes and Guzman de Alfarache, to pen a dissertation on The Constancy and Patience of Job (1631), to translate St Francis de Sales and Seneca, to compose thousands of verses, and to correspond with Spanish and foreign scholars. But Quevedo was not to maintain unscathed the high position won by his knowledge, talent, and biting wit. The government of Olivares, which he had welcomed as the dawn of a political and social regeneration, made things worse instead of better, committed fault upon fault, and led the country to ruin. Quevedo saw this and could not hold his peace. An anonymous petition in verse enumerat- ing to the king in strong terms the grievances of his sub- jects was found in the early part of December 1639 under the very napkin of Philip IV. It was shown to Olivares, who exclaimed, "I am ruined"; but before his fall he sought vengeance on the libeller. His suspicions fell on Quevedo, who had enemies glad to confirm them. Quevedo was arrested on December 7, and carried under a strong escort to the neighbouring convent of Leon, where he was kept in rigorous confinement till the fall of the minister (23d January 1643) restored him to light and freedom, but not to the health which he had lost in his dungeon. He had little more than two years to live, and these were spent in inactive retreat, first at La Torre de Juan Abad, and then at the neighbouring Villanueva de los Infantes, where he died September 8, 1645. Quevedo was of middle height, with black, somewhat crisp hair, a very fair complexion, a broad forehead, and very sharp eyes always furnished with spectacles. The upper part of his body was well built but the lower part deformed : he limped, and his feet turned inwards. Though of very dissolute manners, he loved study most, and lived surrounded by books. He had a table on wheels for reading in bed and a stand that enabled him to read at table. His conversation, as one might guess from his books, was sparkling, full of unexpected turns and slyness, and many bon-mots are ascribed to him. A few days before his death, as he was about to dictate his last will, the curate who attested it invited him to assign a sum for music at his funeral. " Music ! " said the dying man; " let those who hear it pay for that." As a satirist and humorist Quevedo stands in the first rank of Spanish writers ; his other literary work does not count for much. I. I. Chifflet, in a letter of February 2, 1629, calls him " a very learned man to be a Spaniard," and indeed his erudition was of a solid kind, but he merits attention not as a humanist, philosopher, and moralist, but as the keen polemic writer, the pitiless mocker, the profound observer of all that is wicked and absurd in human nature, and at the same time as a finished master of style and of all the secrets of the Spanish tongue. His style indeed is not absolutely pure, and already belongs to the period of decadence. Quevedo, who ridiculed so well the bad taste of "cultism," fell him- self into another fault and created the style called " conceptism, " which hunts after ambiguous expressions and "double entendres." But, though involved and overcharged with ideas, his style is of singular force and originality ; after Cervantes he is the greatest Spanish writer of the 17th century. There is an excellent collected edition of Quevedo's prose works with a good life of the author by D. Aureliano Fernandez-Guerra (Bibl. Ribadeneyra, vols. xxiii. and xlviii.) ; his poetical works in vol. Ixix of the same collection are badly edited by D. Florenzio laner. (A. M.-F.) QUEZAL, or QTJESAL, the Spanish-American name for one of the most beautiful of birds, abbreviated from the Aztec or Maya Quetzal-tototl, the last part of the com- pound word meaning fowl, and the first, also written Cuetzal, the long feathers of rich green with which it is adorned. 1 The Quezal is one of the TKOGONS (q.v.), and was originally described by Hernandez (Historia, p. 13), whose account was faithfully copied by Willughby. Yet the bird remained practically unknown to ornithologists until figured in 1825, from a specimen belonging to Leadbeater, 2 by Temminck (PI. col., 372) who, however, mistakenly thought it was the same as the Trogon pavoninus, a con- generic but quite distinct species from Brazil, that had just been described by Spix. The scientific determination of the Quetzal-bird of Central America seems to have been first made by Bonaparte in 1826, as Trogon paradiseus, according to his statement in the Zoological Society's Pro- ceedings for 1837 (p. 101); but it is not known whether the fact was ever published. In 1832 the Begistro Trimestre, a literary and scientific journal printed at Mexico, of which few copies can exist in Europe, contained a communication by Dr Pablo de la Llave, describing this species (with which he first became acquainted prior to 1810, from examining more than a dozen specimens obtained by the natural-history expedition to New Spain and kept in the palace of the Retiro near Madrid) under the name by which it is now commonly known, Pharomacnis mocino. 3 These facts, however, being almost unknown to the rest of the world, Gould, in the Zoological Proceedings for 1835 (p. 29), while pointing out Temminck's error, gave the species the name of Trogon resplendens, which it bore for some time. Yet little or nothing was generally known about the bird until Delattre sent an account of his meeting with it to the Echo dit Monde Savant for 1843, which was reprinted in the Revue Zoologique for that year (pp. 163-165). In 1860 the nidification of the species, about which strange stories had been told to the naturalist last named, was deter- mined, and its eggs, of a pale bluish-green, were procured 1 The Mexican deity Quetzal-coatl had his name, generally trans- lated " Feathered Snake," from the quetzal, feather or bird, and coatl, snake, as also certain kings or chiefs, and many places, e.g., Quetzal- apan, Quetzaltepec, and Quezaltenango, though perhaps some of the last were named directly from the personages (cf. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, vol. v., Index). Quetzal-itzli is said to be the emerald. 2 This specimen had been given to Mr Canning (a tribute, perhaps, to the statesman who boasted that he had " called a New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old") by Mr Schenley, a diplo- matist, and was then thought to be unique in Europe ; but, apart from those which had reached Spain, where they lay neglected and uude- scribed, James Wilson says (Illustr. Zoology, pi. vi., text) that others were brought with it, and that one of them was given to the Edinburgh Museum. On the 21st day of the sale of Bullock's Museum in 1819, Lot 38 is entered in the Catalogue as " The Tail Father of a magni- ficent undescribed Trogon " and probably belonged to this species. 3 De la Llave's very rare and interesting memoir was reprinted by M. Salle in the Revue et Magazin de Zoologie for 1861 (pp. 23-33).