GRACIAN Y MORALES, BALTASAR (1601-1658), Spanish prose writer and Jesuit. His principal works are El Heroe (1637); the Arte de ingenio, tratado de Agudeza (1642), a sys tem of rhetoric in which the principles of conceptismo as op posed to culteranismo are inculcated; El Discreto (1646), a de lineation of the typical courtier; El Ordculo manual y arte de prudencia (1647) ; and El Criticon an ingenious philosophical allegory of human existence.
See Karl Borinski, Baltasar Gracidn and die Hoflitteratur in Deutschland (Halle, 1894) ; Benedetto Croce, I Trattatisti italiani del "concettismo" e Baltasar Gracian (Napoli, 1899) ; A. Coster, "Baltasar Gracian, 1601-58," Revue Hispanique, xxix., pp. A. F. G. Bell, Baltasar Gracidn (1921).