OVIEDO Y VALDEZ, GONZALO FERNANDEZ DE, an early historian of the New World, was born at Madrid, of noble descent, in 1478. He was attached in his boyish years to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella as one of the pages of Prince John, where he received an excellent education. The discoveries of Columbus had just opened up the New World to Spanish enterprise; and in 1513 Oviedo was sent out to San Domingo as a supervisor of gold smeltings, where, except occasional visits to Spain and Spanish America, he remained during the rest of his life. In this position he is said to have treated the natives of the island with great cruelty, so that their gentle and feeble race rapidly melted away under the harsh servitude of the gold mines. In addition to his original appointment, Oviedo held several important offices under the Spanish government in Hayti. He had always exhibited a passion for writing; and the post of historiographer of the Indies to Charles V. was quite to his liking. Besides some inconsiderable chronicles of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of Charles V., and a Life of Cardinal Ximenes, he wrote two works of abiding interest and value: one was La General y Natural Historia de las Indias Occidentales, consisting of fifty books, of which twenty-one were published at Seville in 1535, while the rest remain still in manuscript. Several editions of this History have been published, of which the latest is that begun in 1851 by the Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid. It was translated into French by Poleur in 1556, and into English by Eden in 1555. This work contains a great mass of valuable information, thrown together in a crude, indigestible state, and written in a loose, rambling, moralizing style, sadly provoking to the reader's patience. It is worthy of notice also, that his contemporary, the brave and philanthropic Las Casas, the defender of the American Indians, a man who had ample means of knowing about the affairs of the New World, denounces the History of Oviedo as "as full of lies almost as pages." The benevolent churchman and the courtly historian had separate interests, however, which kept up a constant hostility between them. Las Casas was doubtless much the nobler man of the two, but Oviedo was not therefore necessarily a wholesale fabricator. The other work for which Oviedo is still esteemed among scholars is Las Quinquagenas, written during the latter years of the author's life, and devoted to fond recollections of his native land, and of the principal characters who had figured there during his time. It consists of a series of immethodical dialogues, full of gossip and curious anecdote, drawn from the memory of a long life. It occupies three folios of MS. in the National Library of Madrid, but has never been printed. The author concludes by saying that it was finished on the 23d May 1556, when he was seventy-nine years old. He died at Valladolid during the following year. (See Ticknor's Hist. of Spanish Literature, vol. i., p. 514; and Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, vol. i., p. 187.)