Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in a place where there are many schools of various branches of learning, desiring to investigate the questions and doubts that occur in the classes. This he seeks to do by discussing the points with his tutor, who endeavours to elucidate what the scholar finds difficult or obscure to understand. Every science and art, from theology to rhetoric, is brought under review by the curious scholar, and expounded by the omniscient tutor, and the type of this and many other such books written in Spain from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century may be seen with little change in our Sandford and Merton and similar works. Sancho the Brave wrote another book, notable as the forerunner of a school of didactic literature which afterwards flourished exceedingly, not only in Spain but also in Italy, though never to any very great extent in England. I refer to the books intended specially to teach morality, statesmanship, and perspicuity to young princes and nobles. They were often given as a rule of life by old or dying sovereigns or high ministers to their sons. Sancho the Brave's book, which is called El Libro de los Castigos y Dommentos, or Book of Punishments and Proofs, was written three years before his death in 1292, for the guidance of his son Prince Ferdinand. It contains fifty chapters, in which is unfolded a complete moral and religious guide of conduct in all relations of life, public and private, rules for the guidance of political affairs, for management of men, and' for behaviour in peace and war. As a specimenof the tone of these counsels I will quote, in Spanish and English, one of Don Sancho's chapters :— ' Que fabla quant buena cosa es cordura, / como es fija del buen entendimiento' " Mio fijo: mete mientes en quant buena cosa es cordura. La cordura es fija del buen ent...