Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Baltazar Gracian

GRACIAN, Baltazar (1584-1653), one of the princi pal " cultistas " or Spanish prose writers of the school of Gongora, was born at Calatayud, Aragon, in 1584. Little is known of his personal history except that on attaining to manhood he entered the Society of Jesus, and that ulti mately he became rector of the Jesuit College at Tarragona, where he died in 1658. His principal works are El lleroe (1630), written in short compact sentences, which has been described as a sort of recipe for miking a hero ; La Agudeza, y A tie de Ingenio (16 48), a sort of art of poetry or system of rhetoric in which the principles of "Gongorism" are inculcate! ; Or it icon (1650-53), an allegory in which, under the imigery of the seasons of the year, the course of human life is described; El Discreto, a delineation of the typical character of a courtier j Oraculo Manual, a system of rules for the conduct of life. His works, which have been often reprinted in Spanish under the name of his brother Lorenzo, have also for the most part been translated into French and Italian. The Oraculo Manual has been translated into German by A. Schopenhauer (1862), and into English anonymously (Courtier s Manual Oracle, 1684). The Hero also occurs in English (from the French, 1726). Gracian s merits as a writer have been very differently estimated by his critics, and it is probable that from none of them has he received strict justice. If his style is hardly so bombastic, involved, and obscure as his enemies represent it, neither can he in fairness receive all that credit for depth and originality of thought which is claimed for him by his friends. As examples of the widely differing appreciations which have been passed upon him, see Ticknor s Spanish Literature, vol. iii., and Mr Grant Duff s Miscellanies (1878).