Aleman,

Aleman, MATEO, a famous Spanish novelist, was born about the middle of the 16th century, at Seville, and died in Mexico in 1610. He was author of a metrical life of St Antony of Padua (1604), and an Ortografía Castellana (1608); but his great work is Guzman de Alfarache, a novel with a rascal for the hero, which, first published in Madrid in 1599, in half-a-dozen years had run through twenty-six editions, consisting of not less than 50,000 copies. As regards both delineation of manners and purity of style, this masterly creation ranks next to that most celebrated of all the Spanish 'picaresque' novels, Mendoza's Lazarillo de Tormes.