Page:Post-Mediaeval Preachers.djvu/202

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MAXIMILIAN DEZA.




Maximilian Deza, an Italian, was born in 1610, and joined the Congregation of the Mother of God, in which he soon became famous as a preacher. He seems to have been a man of fervent piety and Apostolic zeal. He had acquired a good knowledge of the Latin classics in his early years, and this he was fond of exhibiting, with some pedantry, in his discourses. But such was the taste of the times, when classic literature and art were deluging Europe, and producing a revulsion in all the laws of taste which had regulated the mediævals. This affectation of classic learning was the bane of Deza’s oratory, and it is constantly obtruding itself on the reader, in a marked and offensive manner, though nowhere perhaps so prominently as in his sermon at the marriage of the Queen of Poland with the Duke of Lorraine, in the Cathedral of Neustadt in Austria, in which sermon, for instance, he enumerates celebrated marriages, as those of Cadmus and Harmonia, Jupiter and Juno, David and Michal, Isaac and Rebecca, and that at Cana—all in one breath.