The military part of his personal history, which consisted of service under Don John of Austria against the Moriscos of Granada, was not of much consequence, though he seems to have valued himself upon it not a little. The part he gave to letters was more interesting and important. This portion he began, in 1590, with a translation of the “Dialogues on Love,” by Abarbanel, a Platonizing Jew, whose family had been expelled from Spain in the persecution under Ferdinand and Isabella, and who in Italy had published this singular work under the name of “The Hebrew Lion.” The attempt, so far as Garcilasso was concerned, was not a fortunate one. The Dialogues, which enjoyed considerable popularity at the time, had been already printed in Spanish,--a fact evidently unknown to him; and though, as it appears from a subsequent statement by himself, he had obtained for his translation the favorable regard of Philip the Second, still there was an odor both of Judaism and heathen free-thinking about it, that rendered it obnoxious to the ecclesiastical authorities of the state. Garcilasso’s first work, therefore, was speedily placed on the Index Expurgatorius, and was rarely heard of afterwards.
His next attempt was on a subject in which he had a nearer interest. It was a “History of Florida,” or rather of the first discovery of that country, and was published in 1605,--a work which, when, twenty years before, he spoke of writing it, he appropriately called “The Expedition of Fernando de Soto”; since the adventures of that extraordinary man, and his strange fate, not only form its most brilliant and attractive portion, but constitute nearly the whole of its substance. In this Garcilasso was more successful than he was in his version from the Italian; and his “History of Florida,” as it is still called, has been often reprinted since.
But, in his old age, his heart turned more and more to the thoughts and feelings of his youth, and, gathering together the few materials he could collect from among his kinsmen on the Pacific, as well as from the stores of his own memory and the records already accumulated in Spain, he published, in 1609, the first part of his “Commentaries on Peru”; the second of which, though licensed for the press in 1613, did not appear till 1617, the year after its author’s death. It is a garrulous, gossiping book, written in a diffuse style, and abounding in matters personal to himself. In its very division, he acknowledges frankly the conflicting claims that he felt were upon him. The earlier half, he says, relates to the eighteen Incas known to Peruvian history, and contains an account of the traditions of the country, its institutions, manners, and general character; all which he offers as a tribute due to his descent from the Children of the Sun. The remainder--which, with many episodes and much irrelevant, but not always unpleasant, discussion, contains the history of the Spanish conquest, and of the quarrels of the Spaniards with each other growing out of it--he offers, in like manner, to the glories of the great Spanish family with which he was connected, and which numbered on its rolls some of the brightest names in the Castilian annals. In both parts, his Commentaries are a striking and interesting book, showing much of the spirit of the old chronicles, and infected with even more than the common measure of chronicling credulity; since, with a natural willingness to believe whatever fables were honorable to the land of his birth, he mingles a constant anxiety to show that he is, above every thing else, a Catholic Christian, whose faith was much too ample to reject the most extravagant legends of his Church, and too pure to tolerate the idolatry of that royal ancestry which he yet cannot help regarding with reverence and admiration.[215]