ALONSO DE ERCILLA Y ZUNIGA (1533-1595)  ,

Spanish soldier and poet, was born in Madrid on the 7th of August 1533 . In 1548 he was appointed page to the heir-apparent, afterwards Philip II . In this capacity Ercilla visited Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, and was present in 1554 at the marriage of his master to Mary of England . Hearing that an expedition was preparing to subdue the Araucanians of Chile, he joined the adventurers . He distinguished himself in the ensuing campaign; but, having quarrelled with a comrade, he was condemned to death in 1558 by his general, Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza . The sentence was commuted to imprisonment, but Ercilla was speedily released and fought at the battle of Quipeo (14th of December 1558) . He returned to Spain in 1562, visited Italy, France, Germany, Bohemia, and in 1570 married Maria de Bazan, a lady distantly connected with the Santa Cruz family; in 1571 he was made knight of the order of Santiago, and in 1578 he was employed by Philip II. on a mission to Saragossa . He complained of living in poverty but left a modest fortune, and was obviously disappointed at not being offered the post of secretary of state . His principal work is La Araucana, a poem based on the events of the wars in which he had been engaged . It consists of three parts, of which the first, composed in Chile and published in 1569, is a versified narrative adhering strictly to historic fact; the second, published in 1578, is en-cumbered with visions and other romantic machinery; and the third, which appeared in 1589-1590, contains, in addition to the subject proper, a variety of episodes mostly irrelevant . This so-called epic lacks symmetry, and has been over-praised by Cervantes and Voltaire; but it is written in excellent Spanish, and is full of vivid rhetorical passages . An analysis of the poem was given by Hayley in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1782) .

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good biography precedes the Morceaux choisis (Paris, 1900) by Jean Ducamin . ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, the joint names of two French writers whose collaboration made their work that of, so to speak, one personality . SMILE ERCKMANN (1822—1899) was born on the 20th of May 182 2 at Phalsbourg, and Louis GRATIEN CHARLES ALEXANDRE CHATRIAN (1826—189o) on the 18th of December 1826 at Soldatenthal, Lorraine . In 1847 they began to write together, and continued doing so till 1889 . Chatrian died in 1890 at Villemomble near Paris, and Erckmann at Luneville in 1899 . The list of their publications is a long one, ranging from the Histoires et contes fantastiques (1849; reprinted from the temocrate du Rhin), L'Illustre Docteur Mat/thus (1859), Madame Therese (1863), L'Ami Fritz (1864), Histoire d'un conscrit de 1813 (1864), Waterloo (1865), Le Blocus (1867), Histoire d'un paysan .. (4 vols., 1868-1870), L'Histoire du plebiscite (1872), to Le Grandpere Lebigue (188o) ; besides dramas like Le Juif polonais (1869) and Les Rantzau (1882) . Without any special literary claim, their stories are distinguished by simplicity and genuine descriptive power, particularly in the battle scenes and in connexion with Alsatian peasant life . They are marked by a genuine democratic spirit, and by real patriotism, which developed after 187o into hatred of the Germans . The authors attacked militarism by depicting the horrors of war in the plainest terms . See also J .