Nicholas, knight of the order of St James, and canon of Seville, was born at Seville in 1617, being the son of a gentleman whom King Philip IV. made president of the admiralty established in that city in 1626. After having gone through a course of philosophy and divinity in his own country, he studied law at Salamanca. Upon his return to Seville, he shut himself up in the royal monastery of Benedictines, where he employed himself several years in writing his Bibliotheca Hispanica, having the use of the books of Bennet de la Sana, abbot of that monastery, and dean of the faculty of divinity at Salamanca. By this help, and about 30,000 volumes in his own library, joined to continual labour and indefatigable application, he was at last enabled to finish his Bibliotheca Hispanica, in four volumes folio, two of which he published at Rome in the year 1672. The work consists of two parts; the one containing the Spanish writers who flourished before the fifteenth century, and the other those since the end of that century. After the publication of these two volumes, he was recalled to Madrid by King Charles II. At his death, which took place in 1684, he left nothing but his vast library; and his two brothers and nephews being unable to publish the remaining volumes of his Bibliotheca, sent them to Cardinal d'Aguisine, who paid the expense of the impression, and committed the superintendence of it to M. Martin, his librarian, who added notes in the name of the cardinal. These two volumes were published in 1696. Improved editions of both these works, by F. P. Bayer, were published at Madrid in 4 vols. folio, in 1783-8. A work by Antonio was published for the first time at Valencia in 1742, entitled Censura de Historias Fabulas, obra postuma, folio.