MAXIMILIAN DEZA.
Maximilian Deza, an Italian, was born in 1610, and
joined the Congregation of the Mother of God, in
which he soon became famous as a preacher. He seems
to have been a man of fervent piety and Apostolic zeal.
He had acquired a good knowledge of the Latin classics
in his early years, and this he was fond of exhibiting,
with some pedantry, in his discourses. But such was
the taste of the times, when classic literature and art
were deluging Europe, and producing a revulsion in all
the laws of taste which had regulated the mediævals.
This affectation of classic learning was the bane of
Deza’s oratory, and it is constantly obtruding itself
on the reader, in a marked and offensive manner,
though nowhere perhaps so prominently as in his
sermon at the marriage of the Queen of Poland with
the Duke of Lorraine, in the Cathedral of Neustadt in
Austria, in which sermon, for instance, he enumerates
celebrated marriages, as those of Cadmus and Harmonia,
Jupiter and Juno, David and Michal, Isaac and Rebecca,
and that at Cana—all in one breath.
