QUINTANA, ManuelJosé (1772-1857), Spanish poet and man of letters, was born at Madrid on April 11, 1772, and after completing his studies at Salamanca was called to the bar. In 1-801 he produced an unsuccessful tragedy A7 Duque de Viseo∙, his Pelayo (1805), appealing as it did to the spirit of resistance to foreign oppression, was much more successful. The first volume of his somewhat rhetorical and superficial Vidas de Espanoles Célébrés, in 1807, containing lives of Spaniards who had successfully opposed the enemies of their country, was similar in motive, and at the outbreak of the revolution of 1808 Quintana, as journalist ( Variedades, and Semanario patriotico), as secretary to the cortes and the regency, and also as “the Spanish Tyrtaeus” {Odas ά Espana libre, 1808), rendered important services to the patriotic cause. On the return of Ferdinand VII. in 1814 he shared the fate of other “liberals” or “constitutionalists,” and had to endure six years’ imprisonment in Pamplona, obtaining his release only in 1820, when he was named president of the department of public instruction under the new Govern-

ment. The counter-revolution of 1823 again drove him from office, to which he was once more restored after the death of the king in 1833. In 1835 he was made a senator and peer; and in 1855, at a meeting of the cortes, a laurel crown was placed on his head by Queen Isabella II., whose “governor” he had been during her minority. He died at Madrid on March 11, 1857....