[333] The autograph manuscript of “El Ciceron,” neatly written out in 219 folio pages, double columns, with the corrections of the author and the erasures of the censor, is in the Boston Athenæum. It is accompanied by three autograph letters of Father Isla; by the opinion of the censor, that the poem ought not to be published; and by an answer to that opinion;--the last two being anonymous. These curious and valuable manuscripts were procured in Madrid by E. Weston, Esq., and presented by him to the Library of the Athenæum, in 1844.
Others of Father Isla’s works were more fortunate. Six volumes of his sermons were collected and published, and six volumes of his letters, chiefly addressed to his sister and her husband, and written in a very affectionate and gay spirit. To these, at different times, were added a few minor works of a trifling character, and one or two that are religious.[334]
[334] The works alluded to are,--“El Mercurio General,” (Madrid, 1784, 18mo,) being extracts from accounts claimed to have been written by Father Isla for that journal, in 1758, of the European events of the year, but not certainly his;--“Cartas de Juan de la Enzina,” (Madrid, 1784, 18mo,) a satirical work on the follies of Spanish medicine;--“Cartas Familiares,” written between 1744 and 1781; published, 1785-86, also in a second edition, Madrid, 1790, 6 tom. 12mo;--“Coleccion de Papeles Crítico-Apologéticos,” (1788, 2 tom. 18mo,) in defence of Feyjoó;--“Sermones,” Madrid, 1792, 6 tom. 8vo;--“Rebusco,” etc., (Madrid, 1790, 18mo,) a collection of miscellanies, some of which are probably not by Father Isla;--“Los Aldeanos Críticos”; again in defence of Feyjoó;--and various papers in the Seminario Erudito, Tom. XVI., XX., and XXXIV., and in the supplementary volume of the “Fray Gerundio.” A poem, entitled “Sueño Político,” (Madrid, 1785, 18mo,) on the accession of Charles III., is also attributed to him; and so are “Cartas atrasadas del Parnaso,” a satire which is not supposed to have been written by him, though it reminds one sometimes of the “Ciceron.”
But what most surprised the world was his translation of “Gil Blas,” printed in 1787, claiming the work, on which the fame of Le Sage must always principally rest, as “stolen from the Spanish, and now,” in the words of Father Isla’s title-page, “restored to its country and native language by a Spaniard, who does not choose to have his nation trifled with.”[335] The external grounds for this extraordinary charge are slight. The first suggestion occurs in 1752, and is made by Voltaire, who, in his “Age of Louis the Fourteenth,” declares the Gil Blas “to be entirely taken from Espinel’s ‘Marcos de Obregon.’” This charge, as we have seen, is not true, and we have reason to believe that it was the result of personal ill-will on the part of Voltaire, who had himself been attacked in the Gil Blas, and who had, in some way or other, heard that Le Sage was indebted to Espinel. Afterwards, similar declarations are made in two or three books of no authority, and especially in a Biographical Dictionary printed at Amsterdam in 1771. But this is all.