Quevedo Villegas, FRANCISCO GOMEZ DE, was born at Madrid in 1580. His father was secretary to the queen and his mother one of her ladies in waiting. The Quevedos were one of the old families of the Montaña, the mountain-region between Burgos and Santander. The name was no doubt derived from a place on the Besaya River, but the punning motto of the scutcheon on their house in the adjacent Toranzo valley, 'I am he who stopped—el que vedó—the advance of the Moors,' expressed the family tradition, and, like Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, and others of the race, Quevedo was not a little proud of an ancestry that claimed a share in stemming the tide of Moslem conquest. Villegas was the name of his grandmother's family, another of the same mountain stock. He was left an orphan at an early age, and sent by his guardian to the university of Alcalá, from which he came away with such a name for varied scholarship that he may be said to have entered upon life with a reputation ready made. Apparently a quiet, studious, meditative life would have been his own choice, but chance ordered it otherwise for him. The fatal issue of a duel, brought about by his chivalrous championship of a woman who had been insulted in his presence, drove him in 1611 to the court of his friend the Duke of Ossuna, the new viceroy of Sicily; and he, perceiving in Quevedo, poet, scholar, and bookworm as he was, the capacities of an able administrator and diplomatist, made him his right-hand man, and kept him constantly employed in confidential missions to Rome, Milan, Genoa, and Venice, and when promoted to the vice-royalty of Naples, chose him as his minister of finance, an office in which Quevedo's success was only equalled by his integrity.
He was involved in the fall of Ossuna in 1619, and kept in prison for a time, but there was in fact nothing to tax him with except fidelity, and he was permitted to retire to La Torre de Juan Abad, a small estate of his in the Sierra Morena; he was allowed, however, to return to Madrid in 1623, and became a persona grata at the court of Philip IV. In 1626 he published his most important work, the Politica de Dios, sketched probably in Italy, but put into shape during his banishment. He had been for ten years behind the scenes, and had watched the working of one-man-rule in its worst form under the autocracy of the Duke of Lerma, and in the Politica he made an earnest and eloquent appeal to the king to be a king, not in name only, but in fact. 'The heart of the king,' he said, 'must be in no hand but God's.' Possibly it would never have seen the light had Philip IV. been true to the promise of his youth; but he soon grew weary of governing, and left it to Olivares, and so long as Olivares remained in power Quevedo's book continued to be a popular one. In 1628 he followed up his attack on government by favourites in an apologue entitled Hell Reformed. He remained, however, on friendly terms with Olivares; and if honours and high place could have tempted him he might have had anything in the minister's gift. He would have been a valuable buttress to an unstable regime, and it was desirable to silence a man who had an awkward knack of telling the truth in a way that brought it home to the public. But Quevedo had no mind to be a favourite's favourite, and all that he could be got to accept was the purely honorary title of secretary to the king. In the winter of 1639 another way of effecting his purpose presented itself to Olivares. A memorial in verse to the king, imploring him in respectful and loyal language to look with his own eyes to the miserable condition of his kingdom, was one day placed in his napkin on the royal table. Quevedo was denounced as the author (and no doubt he was, though his biographer, Dr de Tarsia, strives to disprove it), and was arrested at night and carried off to the convent of San Marcos at Leon, where, heavily ironed, he was lodged in a cell below the level of the river that washes the convent wall. He was soon struck down by an illness, brought on by cold and damp, from which he never recovered. He appealed to Olivares, but Olivares represented the king as implacable. In 1643, however, the count-duke fell from power, the ruthlessness of the king disappeared, and Quevedo was free to return to Madrid, broken in health and fortune; all his property within reach had been seized with his books and papers. He remained a year in Madrid, and then went home to La Torre to die; but the next year his sufferings became so acute that he had to move to Villanueva de los Infantes for medical aid, and there death released him in September 1645.
Quevedo was one of the most prolific Spanish poets, and was ranked by his contemporaries with Juan de Mena, Garcilaso, Lope, and Gongora; but he wrote no poetry for the world. His verses were all written for his friends or for himself, and, except those in the Florcs of Espinosa (1605), the few pieces published in his life-time were printed without his consent. Poetry was with him a recreation and a solace, and, according to his nephew, some of his gayest and brightest verses were written in his cell at San Marcos. His poetry therefore is for the most part of an occasional character, and to a great extent made up of what would now be called vers de société; sonnets, serious and satirical, form a large portion of it, and light humorous ballads and songs a still larger. His more ambitious work is at times disguised by conceits, but that it is the work of a true poet no one will dispute. All through life he was at war with the poets of the 'Culto' school, Gongora and his followers ('the scourge of silly poets' Cervantes called him), and this perhaps may have made him chary of appearing in public as a poet; but if he took no pains to place himself upon the roll of Spanish poets, he added to it the name of Francisco de la Torre, whose poems he discovered and published in 1631. It was for a long time maintained that the discovery was a pretended one; but it is now admitted that he could not have been the author. His place as a dramatist is not so well defined. About a dozen of his interludes are extant, but of his comedies, except two of which he was joint-author with Antonio de Mendoza, nothing is known. His prose is even more multifarious than his verse. His first book was a life of St Thomas de Villanueva in 1620 and his last, in 1644, a life of St Paul; and the greater part of his prose is of the same character, as is indicated by the titles: The Patience and Constancy of Job, The Cradle and the Grave, Virtue Militant, The Martyrdom of Marcelo Mastrillo, Instruction how to Die, The Introduction to Devout Life, from St Francis de Sales, and others of the same kind. Of his political works the Politica de Dios is the chief; but he also wrote a Life of Marcus Brutus, to which he was adding a second part when struck down by his last illness, a Letter to Louis XIII., on the war of 1635, and several shorter tracts. In 1626, at Saragossa, his brilliant picaresque novel, the Vida del Buscon Pablos, or, as it was called after his death, the Gran Tacaño, was printed, apparently, like most of his books, without his permission, and at once took its place beside Guzman de Alfarache; and in 1627 his five Visions, four of which had been written between 1607 and 1610, and the fifth in 1621, were printed in the same way at Barcelona. His friend, Vander Hammen, immediately printed three of them at Saragossa from his own copies, and added the Casa de los locos de Amor ('The Madhouse of Lovers'), which has ever since been wrongly attributed to Quevedo. He himself disowned it; it bears no trace of his hand, and it is not printed as his by Vander Hammen, who, moreover, afterwards confessed himself the author. Chiefly for the sake of the vision or apologue of Hell Reformed, a sort of offshoot or sequel to the Politica de Dios, he wished the Visions to appear in an authorised edition at Madrid; but unluckily they were submitted for examination to the Padre Niseno, a friend of Montalvan, the dramatist, who had a grudge against Quevedo, and to obtain a license he had to consent to barbarous mutilations of his work which in some places make utter nonsense of it; and it is in this mangled shape the Visions have been printed ever since 1631. He added some short humorous pieces, on the affections of the Culto school, the use of vulgar slang phrases, silly popular beliefs, and the like; and, the better to mask the design of the others, he called the volume Juquetes de la Niñez ('Playthings'), and apologised for the whole as the work of his youth, though the principal piece was written only three years back. The vision or apologue was Quevedo's favourite form of expression; his peculiar humour and satire are nowhere better seen than in Fortuna con Scso ('Fortune Right'), written in 1635, but not printed till 1650, in which Fortune demonstrates by experiment that if strict logic and justice took her place mankind would have a great deal more to complain of.
The edition of Quevedo's works in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (vols. xxiii. and xlvi., prose, edited by Aureliano Fernandez-Guerra; vol. lix., verse, edited by Florencio Janer) is the only one that can be said to approach completeness. Many of the pieces in it are printed for the first time. The prose is edited with commendable thoroughness and industry; but Señor Fernandez-Guerra has unfortunately preferred the expurgated text of the Visions to that which came direct from the hand of Quevedo; he gives, however, the most important of the variations in his notes. The volume of verse is less satisfactory, and follows the stupid pedantic arrangement of the 17th-century editors. After Quevedo's death editions followed in quick succession, but most of them are slovenly in the extreme as regards editing, paper, and print. A handsome edition in 3 vols. 4to was issued by Foppens (Brussels, 1660-71), and well printed, if not critical ones by Ibarra (6 vols. 8vo, Madrid, 1772), by Sancha (11 vols. 8vo, Madrid, 1791-94), and by Castellanos (5 vols. 8vo, illustrated, Madrid, 1841-45); and an admirable selection (which in Quevedo's case is not only a defensible but a desirable form) was published by Villalpando (6 vols. 12mo, Madrid, 1798).
The earliest translations from Quevedo were into French by the Sieur de la Geneste, who translated the Visions in 1633, the Hell Reformed in 1634, and the Vida del Buscon, according to Barbier in 1633, or 1641 according to Brunet. His versions are by no means faithful or accurate, but they have the advantage of being based upon Quevedo's original text. From them most of the English versions have been made—e.g. Visions; or Hell's Kingdom, by R. Croshawe (1640); Hell Reformed, by E. M. (1641); Buscon, the Witty Spaniard, by J. Davies (1657); and the well-known lively version of the Visions by Sir R. L'Estrange (1667). Captain John Stevens in 1697 produced a good translation from the original of Fortuna con Seso; and of the Vida del Buscon and some shorter pieces in 1707; and his translations, together with L'Estrange's Visions, were published in 3 vols. at Edinburgh in 1798 as Quevedo's Works. The best French translation of the Vida del Buscon is one by D'Herimilly under the title of the Fin Matois (1776), edited and by no means improved by Restif de la Bretonne. That by M. Germond de Lavigne is unfaithful. Led away by an absurd theory that Quevedo wrote the story when he was only fifteen, he has tampered with the text to make it suit his preposterous chronology. Under the title of Voyages récréatifs de Quevedo four of the Visions were very freely rendered by the Abbé Beraud in 1756. In 1648 Hans Moscherosch gave a still more free German version under the title of Wunderliche Gesichte Philander's von Sittewald; and in 1841 Dr Guttenshtein treated the Buscon in much the same fashion in Der Glücksritter. An Italian translation of the novel by G. P. Franco appeared in 1634.