ich 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.

But it is to be observed, that these words, _Non scitur certo annus quo
natus est P. Franciscus Xaverius_, are dashed out with the stroke of a
pen. There is also a line drawn over these other words, _Natum eum dici
millesimo, quadragintesimo, nonagesimo-sexto_: and this is written over
head, _Natus est P. Franciscus Xaverius anno millesimo quingentesimo
sexto_. Father Francis Xavier was born in the year 1506. There is also
written in the margin, _Natus est die 7 Aprilis, anni 1506_. He was born
on the 7th of April, 1506.

That which renders this testimony more authentic, is, that at the bottom
of the letter, these words, in Spanish, are written by the same ha