CRU'SIUS, CHRISTIAN AUGUST, a philosophical writer, who enjoyed a past but transient reputation in the beginning of the last century. He was born in 1712 at Leona, in Merseburg, and died in 1776, first professor of theology at Leipzig. His design was a recon ciliation of philosophy with the orthodox theology. Considering the Wolfian philosophy the great enemy of religion, lie made that the chief object of his attack. Ile was successful in exposing several of the dogmatical assertions of his opponents, particularly what are technically called the ontological and cosmological demonstrations of the being of a God. Unfortunately however he set up a system even more dogmatical than the one which lie attempted to subvert, and ho had the mortification to outlive the reputation which he had acquired. CRUZ, JUANA INES DE LA, the most celebrated poetess whom Mexico has hitherto produced, and well known in Spain by the name of the Nun of Mexico,' was born about twelve leagues from that city, at St. Miguel de Nepanthla, on the 12th of November 1651, and early displayed an ardent love for knowledge. At five years of ago she could read and write, cypher, and sow ; and soon after, when she was told there was a university at Mexico, she begged her father, Don Pedro de Asbaje. a Spaniard, to allow her to put on boy's clothes and go there. When she was afterwards taken to live in that city, she learned the Latin language in twenty lessons, and became such a pro ficient as to be able to write and speak it with fluency. She was appointed one of the ladies in attendance oo the Marchioness of Man cera, the wife of the viceroy of Mexico; and on one occasion, when she was seventeen, the marquis iuvited to an evening party forty of the most learned men in Mexico, professors of mathematics, &c., and
brought her into conversation with them all. "Just as a royal galleon would defend itself from an attack of boats," so the viceroy more than once told her biographer Calleja, "did sho disembarrass herself of all the questions and arguments they could propose to her, each in his own particular branch." It was at this age that she resolved to become a nun ; and though favoured by nature, and repeatedly besought in marriage, the principal objection that she felt to taking the veil was a doubt whether it would be allowable in a nun to occupy herself with books so much as she felt inclined to do. She lived twenty-seven years in the couveut of St. Jerome at Mexico, and died on the 17th of April 1695 of the plague, leaving bchiud her a library of 4000 volumes. Her works, of which six,editions had appeared in Spain before 1700 (and as many have been published since), extend to three quarto volumes, and comprise a number of plays, most of them on sacred subjects, but two of less serious character—one on the story of 'Theseus and Ariadue,' the other, Los Empeaos de mai Casa,' a comedy of the usual chaimeter of Spanish comedies, with the scene laid at Madrid. Mrs. Hale, in her Woman's Record' (New York, 1853), gives some pretty and spirited verses, translated frctu the Nun of Mexico, directed against the unjust depreciation of her sex. Sho was commonly called 'the Tenth Muse,' and the same title was bestowed ou the other American poetess, her contemporary, Anne Bradstreet, of New England, who died in 1672, aged sixty, but whose poems were published iu 1642, nine years before Inca de la Cruz was born.