We now come to the best-known trait in Luis de Leon’s career.  He would seem to have begun lecturing in his new chair on January 29, 1577.[195] The gathering was large, and now and here—­if at any time and in any place—­he must have begun his lecture with the famous phrase:  ‘As we were saying yesterday’ (Dicebamus hesterna die).  Almost everybody who hears the story for the first time takes it for granted that the remark was made to what was left of Luis de Leon’s old class—­the class which he had been instructing just previous to his arrest:  otherwise, the anecdote loses great part of its point.  It behoves us therefore to examine the circumstances in which the story was first made public.  The earliest mention of the incident occurs apparently in the Monasticon Augustinianum by the once well-known Nicolaas Cruesen, whose work appeared at Munich in 1623.[196] The picturesque narrative soon struck the popular imagination, and it has been repeated times innumerable.[197] One is always reluctant to part with a good tale, but there is no denying the fact that the evidence in favour of the current version is slighter than one could wish it to be.  The silence of all contemporary Spaniards with respect to this episode is not a little strange.  It is singular that the anecdote should reach Spain from abroad, and that it should not be printed till forty-six years after it is supposed to have occurred; that is to say, till Luis de Leon had been thirty-two years in his grave.  It does not necessarily follow that the story is untrue.  Nobody imagines that Cruesen deliberately invented it.  So far as appears, Cruesen was an absolutely upright man who recorded with fidelity such information as he could obtain.  He was not ill-placed for obtaining information.  Himself an Augustinian, he was something of a cosmopolitan.  Though Flemish by blood, Cruesen was technically a Spanish subject; he was in full sympathy with the politico-religious aims of Spain in the Low Countries, and during the Spanish occupation he must have had opportunities of meeting and questioning men who were Spanish by race.  Moreover, it seems to be established that, though the story concerning Luis de Leon’s remark did not appear in print till 1623, the chapter containing it was written previous to 1612.[198] If this be so, the account given by Cruesen must be dated thirty-five years after the alleged occurrence and twenty-one years after Luis de Leon’s death.  Further, Cruesen, who knew Spanish, travelled in Spain.  There he seems to have made the acquaintance of Fray Basilio Ponce de Leon, Luis de Leon’s able and admiring nephew.  It is by no means impossible that Fray Basilio was Cruesen’s informant,[199] and, if this were proved, the case for the story would be greatly strengthened, since it is inconceivable that the nephew should repeat the anecdote, for the purposes of publication, unless he had had it direct from his famous uncle.  These, however, are conjectures,