Page:Tudor School-boy Life (1908) by Juan Luis Vives.djvu/14

viii Introduction and to himself, in two passages in his ''De Institutione Feminae Christianae'' (1523). This work was translated into English (c. 1540) by Richard Hyrde. As the two passages contain all that is known of the parents, and give a short but picturesque idea of the household relations, I transcribe them from Hyrde's translation: "My mother Blanca, when she had been fifteen years married unto my father, I could never see her strive with my father. There were two sayings that she had ever in her mouth as proverbs. When she would say she believed well anything, then she used to say, ' It is even as though Luis Vives had spoken it.' When she would say she would anything, she used to say, ' It is even as though Luis Vives would it.' I have heard my father say many times, but especially once, when one told him of a saying of Scipio African the younger, or else of Pomponius Atticus (I ween it were the saying of them both), that they never made agree- ment with their mothers. ' Nor I with my wife,' said he, ' which is a greater thing.' When others that heard this saying wondered upon it, and the concord of Vives and Blanca was taken up and used in a manner for a proverb, he was wont to answer like as Scipio was, who said he never made agreement with his mother, because he never made debate with her. But it is not to be much talked in a book (made for another purpose) of my most holy mother, whom I doubt not now to have in heaven the fruit and reward of her holy and pure living." Vives states that he had the intention of writing a " book of her acts and her life," and no one who reads the foregoing passage will be otherwise than regretful that he failed to carry out this purpose. As it is, we must content ourselves with another passage.1 1 From the same Institution of a Christian Woman (Richard Hyrde's translation)