Isla, JOSÉ FRANCISCO DE, was born in 1703 at Vidanes, in north-western Spain. Early in life he joined the Jesuits, for some years was lecturer in philosophy and theology at Segovia, Santiago, and Pamplona, and became famous as a preacher, but still more as a humorist and satirist by his writings, especially his novel of Friar Gerund. Except Cervantes and Quevedo no man had a larger share of that peculiar grave humour which is one of the special products of Spain, and with him it seems to have been almost irrepressible. Even in Youth Triumphant, an account of a masque performed by the students of his own order at Salamanca in 1727, in honour of the canonisation of two young Jesuits, he could not altogether control his propensity to ridicule. The Letters of Juan de la Encina, written in 1732, on a pamphlet by a quack doctor at Segovia who had given him offence, are a good example of his style, but a more characteristic one is the Día Grande de Navarra, a description of the ceremonial at Pamplona on the accession of Ferdinand VI. in 1746, which he wrote at the request of the local authorities. It is, in fact, an adroit caricature of the grandiloquence, pomposity, and inflated phrase usual on such occasions, but his artful flattery of provincial vanity and official self-importance blinded the eyes of the good Pamplonese, and they passed a vote of thanks to him, which he appealed to with an admirable assumption of injured innocence when the wits of Madrid charged him with the joke. He had a hearty contempt for shams and pretences of all sorts. Friar Gerund was aimed at the charlatanism of the popular preachers of the day, especially the preaching friars. The decline of culture produced uncritical audiences, and these again swarms of preachers who tried to get credit with the crowd for originality by tricks, mannerisms, and clap-trap. Isla's model, as he owned in his preface, was Don Quixote; what Cervantes had done with the sham chivalry and sentiment of the romances, he strove to do with the vulgar buffooneries of the pulpit, and he was almost equally successful. The first volume came out at Madrid in 1758, and in three days the whole edition of 1500 was sold off. From the king down everybody was delighted with it—everybody, that is, except the friars, for 'Fray Gerundio' at once became a nickname, and their congregations, they found, laughed at instead of with them. But the friars were a power, and at their instance the Inquisition stopped the publication of the book. A clandestine edition of vol. ii., with the imprint of Campazas, as well as a reprint of vol. i., came out in 1770, and another in 1787, but none with a license until 1813. Isla was struck down with paralysis in 1767 as he was obeying the edict expelling the Jesuits, but he insisted on sharing the lot of his comrades, and betook himself to Bologna, where he lived, cheerful and uncomplaining, in poverty and ill-health, until the end of 1781. A little before his death he wrote his translation of Gil Blas. A friend had urged him to assert their country's claim to a book that, as the French themselves acknowledged, had been stolen from Spain, but he objected that he was not David enough to attack such a Goliath as Le Sage, and that he had never read Gil Blas. But afterwards, having nothing to do, he took it up and translated it, and further amused himself with a preface in which he humoured his friend's patriotic idea in his own grave way, by a circumstantial story in the style of Gerundio and the Día Grande, of how Le Sage (who never was in Spain), being in the suite of the French ambassador at Madrid, met a certain Andalusian advocate who gave him the MS. of the novel. On his title-page he put, 'Stolen from Spain, and restored to its country and native language by a jealous Spaniard who will not allow his nation to be made game of;' words which sufficiently indicate his drift; but his gravity imposed upon the Comte de Neufchâteau of the French Academy, and provoked a serious refutation in 1818, to which Llorente replied in 1820; and the controversy, having that element of paradox which gives vitality to argument, still maintains a fitful existence. See LE SAGE.
The best edition of Isla's works is that in vol. xv. of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, giving Fray Gerundio, the Cartas de Juan de la Eneina, the Día Grande de Navarra, and a full collection of his delightful letters, but omitting his sermons and translations. The English translation of Friar Gerund (1772), by Dr Warner (some say Dr Nugent), is somewhat abridged and a little vulgar in its attempts at the dialect of the Campos rustics, but on the whole pretty faithful.