Abstract
Quevedo was particularly fond of contrasts, and his works,142 ranging from the most elevated subjects, of religion and statesmanship, to the most scurrilous and obscene, are expressive of his wonderful mind. His command of language, in which he has not been equalled by any other Spanish author, is the despair of all those who attempt to fathom his meaning, and the rock upon which are shattered all his imitators. When a student he must have been the most typical of his comrades, embodying the highest aspirations and the lowest tastes, possessed of great powers of work and of perception; storing his memory equally with the wisdom of the Classics and the conceits of his contemporaries, with the exhortations of the Churchfathers and the ribaldry of the rascal.
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Notes
Quevedo enjoys the privilege of being the Spanish author who, next to Cervantes, has had the most faithful, painstaking and intelligent editor in D. Aureliano Fernández-Guerra, and in E. Mérimée a careful critic (Essai sur la vie et les oeuvres de Francisco de Quevedo, par E. Mérimée. Paris, 1886, IX + 466 pp., with an excellent portrait). To the outcome of their investigations it is impossible to add with our present light. Quevedo’s works, as edited (that is, only the first two volumes; the third was prepared by D. Florencio Janer, who died without having fully accomplished the task of commenting and annotating the text) by Fernández-Guerra, occupy vols. 23, 48, 69 of Riv., Bibl. Aut. Esp. The Buscon in Riv. 23, pp. 485–528; the Bibliography (Riv. 23, pp. XCII —XCIII) enumerates forty-six editions. The princeps is of 1626; the last there mentioned are two of 1845.
Mérimée (pp. 150–151) marks the facts to which a date can be placed; they all are contained in the period from 1602 – 1607. Quevedo was born in 1580, and finished his studies at Alcalá not earlier than 1600; so the period of composition followed immediately upon his student life, while the scenes of the work are mainly reminiscenses of his University career.
Lib. I, cap. 11. (Riv. 23, p. 505–506).
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De Haan, F. (1903). La vida del Buscon, by Quevedo. In: An Outline of the History of the Novela Picaresca in Spain. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6318-9_16
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