ANTONIO DE, an eminent Spanish historian and poet, was born on the 18th of July 1610, in Alcalá de Henares, the birth-place of Cervantes, and completed his studies at the University of Salamanca. He began early to write, having produced a drama at the age of seventeen. He had just reached his majority when he gave to the theatre his Gitanilla, or the Pretty Gipsy Girl, founded on a story by Cervantes, which by skilful management in the plot, and by purity and harmony in the versification, secured it a place on the Spanish stage, and has caused its reproduction since by Rowley and Middleton in the Spanish Gipsy, and its imitation in some parts of Longfellow's Spanish Student. This gained for him the friendship of Calderon, with whom he remained on terms of intimacy, occasionally writing for him the preludes to his dramas. Solis was not so successful in his One Fool makes a Hundred, but he regained his place by his Love à la Mode. In 1642 he prepared for a festival at Pamplona, a dramatic entertainment of no great merit, on the story of Orpheus and Euridyce. Solis was now made one of the royal secretaries, and he continued to write for the king's private theatre, and for the public dramatic entertainments of the capital. In the former capacity he produced his Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a wild, poetical drama, written on occasion of the birth of a prince. Tired of the hollow splendour of courts, and longing for religious retirement, he withdrew from his secretaryship, submitted to the tonsure, and, in 1677, as the official historiographer of the Indies, he laid down the plan of his Conquest of Mexico. The period it embraces is less than three years, but a period of greater brilliancy and atrocity has seldom fallen to the lot of annalist. Solis, aged as he was, seems to have had his old blood made young again as he contemplated, with his artist's eye and with his human heart, the daring and the crimes of his historical heroes. His style is altogether his own. It is rich and beautiful, and largely tinctured with the racy old idiom of Castile. "In boldness of manner," says Ticknor (Hist. of Spain Lit., vol. iii., 152), "he falls below Mendoza, and in dignity is not equal to Mariana; but for copious and sustained eloquence he may be placed by the side of either of them." The work attained to a great popularity, which it has maintained down to our own time. The Conquista was published at Madrid in 1684. The best edition is in 2 vols., Madrid, 1783. The author, however, was now a poor old man; and the sale of his book, although remarkable for the time, did not do much to enrich him. "I have many creditors," says Solis, "who would stop me in the street, if they saw I had new shoes on;" and again, this brilliant historian is found asking a friend for a warm garment to protect him from the cold of winter. It is the old story. He died at Madrid on the 19th of April 1686, in his seventy-sixth year. An edition of the Varias Posturas of Solis was published in 1692.