Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/11

ENCYCLOPEDIA BEITANNICA. E N - M E N MENA, JUAN DE, one of the Italianizing Spanish poets of the 15th century, was born at Cordova about 1411. We are informed by Romero, to whom we are indebted for almost all we know about his life, that he had attained the age of twenty-three before he began to give himself to "the sweet labour of good learning," pursuing a regular course of study at Salamanca and afterwards at Rome. It was at the latter city that he first became acquainted with the writings of Dante and Petrarch, which afterwards so powerfully influenced his own style. Having returned to Spain, he became a " veinticuatro," or magis trate, of his native town, and was received as a poet with great favour at the court of John II., being made Latin secre tary to the king and historiographer of Castile. He died suddenly, in consequence of a fall from his mule, in-1456, at Torrelaguna, where the marquis of Santillana, his friend and patron, erected his monument and wrote his epitaph. De Mena s principal work, El Laberinto (" The Labyrinth "), sometimes called Las Trescientas ("The Three Hundred") from the original number of its stanzas, is a didactic allegory on the duties and destinies of man, obviously con structed on the lines of the Divina Commedia of Dante. The poet, while wandering in a wood and exposed to the attacks of various beasts of prey, is met by Providence in the guise of a beautiful woman, who offers to guide him safely through the dangers which surround him, and at the same time to explain " as far as they may be grasped by human understanding " the dark mysteries of life that weigh upon his spirit. He is then led to the spherical centre of the five zones, where he sees the three wheels of destiny, the past, the future, and the present, and the men belonging to each, arranged in the seven circles of planetary influence. Opportunity is thus afforded for a vast quan tity of mythological and historical portraiture ; the best sketches are those of the poet s own contemporaries, but the work in general is much disfigured with all sorts of pedantry, and hardly ever attains to mediocrity as a poem. The Laberinto was first printed at Seville in 1496 ; Nunez and Sanchez accompanied it with commentaries in 1499 and 1582 respectively ; and it is still regarded with a good deal of reverence by the Spaniards as the " magnum opus " of their " Ennius." De Mena was the author of a number of minor poems or " vers de socie te," written merely for court circles, and having neither general interest nor per manent value ; most of them are to be found in the Cancionero General. He also wrote a poem entitled La Coronation, the subject being the " crowning " of the marquis of Santillana by the Muses and the Virtues on Mount Parnassus. Finally, his Siete Pecados Mortales (" Seven Deadly Sins ") is a dull allegory on the antagonism between reason and the will of man. Complete editions of the poems of De Mena appeared in 1528, 1804, and 1840. MANAGE, GILLES (1613-1692), described by Bayle as " one of the most learned men of his time, and the Varro of the 17th century," was the son of Guillaume Manage, king s advocate at Angers, and was born in that city on August 15, 1613. A tenacious memory and an early developed enthusiasm for learning carried him speedily through his literary and professional studies, and we read of him practising at the bar at Angers as early as 1632. In the same year he pleaded several causes before the parlement of Paris, and soon afterwards he attended the " Grand Tours " at Poitiers, but after having been laid aside by a severe illness he abandoned the legal profession and declared his intention of entering the church. He succeeded in obtaining some sinecure benefices, and lived for some years in the household of Cardinal De Retz (then only coadjutor to the archbishop of Paris), where he had ample leisure for his favourite literary pursuits. Some time after 1648 he withdrew to a house of his own in the cloister of Notre Dame, where his remarkable conversational powers enabled him to gather round him on Wednesday evenings those much frequented literary assemblies which he called " Mercuriales." His learning procured for him admission to the Delia Cruscan Academy of Florence, but his irrepressible tendency to caustic sarcasm led to his remorseless exclusion from the French Academy. He died at Paris on July 23, 1692. Of the voluminous works of Manage (fully enumerated in the Dictionnaire of Chauffepie ) the following may be mentioned : Originex de la Lanr/ue Franqoue (1650 ; greatly enlarged in 1694) ; Diogenes Laertius Graece et Latine, cum Commentario (1663 and again much improved in 1692); Poemata Latina, Gallica, Grseca, et Italica (1656; 8th ed., 1687); Origini della Linftua Italiana (1669); and Anti-Baillet (1690).

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