m a family in that mountainous region to the north-west of Spain, occupied at the time of his birth some office of dignity at the court of Philip II. At the age of fifteen young Quevedo graduated in theology at the university of Alcala, where he laid a foundation broad enough for universal scholarship. He must have been possessed of extraordinary natural endowments, as well as of extreme industry. On his return to Madrid he mixed with the distinguished scholars and fashionable cavaliers of his time. In "an affair of honour" in which he had the ill-luck to be engaged, he killed a person of rank, fled to Sicily, was invited to the splendid court of the Duke of Ossuna, viceroy to Philip III., and was subsequently employed in important affairs of state, which demanded on numerous occasions personal courage and involved personal risk. On the conclusion of his master's administration in Sicily, Quevedo was despatched to Madrid in 1615 as a sort of plenipotentiary, where he was very graciously received. He returned to the duke, who was now in Sicily, with a pension of 400 ducats, and was raised to the dignity of minister of finance. He discharged this duty with eminent skill and honesty; and in 1617 he was made a knight of the Order of Santiago. In 1620 the duke fell from power, and Quevedo endured a detention of three years and a half in his patrimonial estate of Torre de Juan Abad. He refused various offices of state, and was content with the merely titular rank of Secretary to the King. He had long had a desire to betake himself to letters, and he did so for the rest of his life. In 1634 he married; but was soon left alone by the death of his wife. In 1659, in consequence of some satirical verses which were placed under the king's napkin at dinner, and which were hastily attributed to Quevedo, he was seized with great suddenness and secrecy, and was rigorously confined for upwards of four years in the royal convent of San Marcos de Leon. Here, in a damp and unwholesome cell, his health was wasted beyond all recovery; his personal property likewise melted away, until he was obliged to depend on charity for his support. In a haughty yet heart-rendering letter written to Olivarez, he tells him despairingly, "No clemency can add many years to my life; no rigour can take many away." The hour of the favourite's disgrace came at last, and Quevedo was free. It was already admitted that another had written the verses; but it was too late. Quevedo failed in his endeavour to recover his lost property; and, unable to subsist in the capital, he retired to the mountains from which his race was sprung, where, worn out by suffering and exhausted by trial, he died in 1645.

The works of Quevedo which have come down to us show him to have been a fruitful and an industrious writer. He tried his hand in all manner of departments, from theology and metaphysics down to stories of vulgar life and wild gipsy ballads. Many of his writings are still in manuscript, in the national library of Madrid and in other collections, public and private. He seems to have published nothing with his name except his meagre translations of Epictetus and Phocylides. His first appearance as an author was probably in The Flowers of Illustrious Poets of his friend Pedro de Espinosa. After his death, Gonzalez de Salas published, in 1648, the first part of such of his poetry as could conveniently be reached; and his nephew, Pedro Alderete, issued the rest in 1670, in a very careless manner, under the concealed title of The Spanish Parnassus, divided into its Two Summits, with the Nine Castilian Masters. Sonnets and ballads are the most numerous; but there are likewise abundance of odes, satires, and idyls. Many of his lighter ballads, such as those of the Gypsies, have attained an unbounded popularity among the peasants, and are still to be heard sung to the guitars throughout the whole of Spain. His burlesque sonnets, in imitation of the Italian, are considered the best in the language. But besides the indecency of much of his poetry, he made use of words and phrases that are low and essentially unpoetical. In 1631 he published a small volume entitled Poems by the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre, which are now generally ascribed to his own pen. The works, however, on which Quevedo's fame mainly rests, both at home and abroad, are in prose. Passing by those on theology and metaphysics, we come to The History and Life of the Great Sharper, Paul of Segovia, first printed in 1627. It is written in the picareseco style of Mendoza's Lazarillo de Tormes, and is overrun with conceits, puns, and a reckless, fierce humour. It teems with wit, and most cruel sarcasm against all orders of society. As a satire it is perhaps too hard and merciless to be considered at all amusing. This, indeed, is the character of most of his other prose satires, and especially his Visions, published in 1635. As an instance of that mixture of the solemn and ludicrous in which he so much delighted, the reader will obtain as good a specimen as can be given in his Dream of Skulls or Dream of Judgment. Everywhere he exhibits a bold, original, and independent spirit; and his personal sufferings may have had much to do with his satirical bitterness and the severity of his sarcasm.

A somewhat diffuse Life of Quevedo was printed at Madrid in 1663 by Don Pablo Antonio de Tarria, a Neapolitan, and is inserted in the tenth volume of the best edition of Quevedo's works, that of Sanchez, Madrid, 11 vols. 8vo, 1791-94. A much more satisfactory Life is to be found in Baena's Hijos de Madrid, tom. ii., pp. 137-154.

Quevedo's Visions were freely rendered into English in 1668 by Sir Roger l'Estrange; a number of his tales were translated into English by Stevens in 1707, and by Pineda in 1734. The latter is the basis of the Edinburgh translation of the Visions, &c., 3 vols. 1798. (See Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature, vol. ii., c. xix.) in law, denotes the giving one thing of value for another; or the mutual consideration and performance of both parties to a contract.

*Quid pro quo*, also used in physic to express a mistake in the physician's bill, where *quid* is written for *quo*, that is one thing for another; or of the apothecary, in reading *quid pro quo*, and giving the patient the wrong medicine. Hence the term is in general extended to all blunders or mistakes committed in medicine, either in the prescription, the preparation, or the application of remedies.

**QUIETISM.** See Mysticism.

**QUILIMANE.** See Mozambique.