Though these two historians have in some sort collected all that can be said concerning St Francis Xavier, I omitted not to take a view of what others have written on that subject; and chiefly the book of Nieremberg, which bears for title, “Claros Varones, or Illustrious Men;” the History of India, by Maffeus, and that of Jarrio; the Church History of Japan, by Solia; the Castilian History of the Missions, which the Fathers of the Society have made to the East Indies, and the kingdoms of China and Japan, composed by Lewis de Gusman; and, lastly, the Portuguese History of the Travels of Ferdinand Mendez Pinto.

But seeing St Francis Xavier himself has written some parts of those accidents which have befallen him in India and Japan, I have faithfully copied his letters, and from thence have drawn those particulars which have much conduced to my information, and clearing of the truth.  These letters have also furnished me with materials to make the narration appear more lively and moving, when you hear the saint himself speaking in his proper words, and mixing his own thoughts and reflections with his actions.  I had almost finished this my work, when I received from Spain and Italy two other lives of St Francis Xavier, which before that time I had not seen:  the one very new, which was written in Italian by Father Joseph Massei; the other more ancient, written in Spanish by Father Francis Garcia.  I found nothing in those two books which I had not observed in others; but read them with great pleasure, as being most exactly and elegantly written, each in their several tongue.

For what remains, amongst all those historians which I have cited, there is only the author of the new Italian Life, who has not followed the common error, in relation to the age of St Francis Xavier:  for the rest of them not precisely knowing the year and day of his birth, have made him ten years older than he was; placing his nativity about the time when the passage to the East Indies was discovered by Vasco de Gama.

But Father Massei has taken his measures in that particular, from Father Poussines, that judicious person to whom we are owing for the new letters of St Xavier, and who has composed a dissertation in Latin, touching the year of our apostle’s birth.

He produces, in the said treatise, a Latin paper, written in all appearance in the year 1585, and found in the records of the house of Don Juan Antonio, Count of Xavier.  That paper,—­wherein is treated of the ancestors and birth of the saint, and which very probably, as Poussines judges, is the minute of a letter sent to Rome, where Dr Navara then resided, to whom it refers you,—­that paper, I say, has these words in it:  Non scitur certo annus quo natus est P. Franciscus Xaverius.  Vulgo tamen invaluit, a quibusdam natum cum dici anno millesimo quadragintesimo nonagesimo-sexto:  which is to say, the year is not certainly known, in which Father Francis Xavier was born; but it is generally held, that some have reported he was born in the year 1496.