varying, or even a mere puppet, met through a succession of events, and moved about by them. In Don Quixote we have two characters acting on one another, and producing the story from within. And these two characters are types of immortal truththe one a gentleman, brave, humane, courteous, of good faculty, for whom a slight madness has made. the whole world fantastic; the other an average human being, selfish, not over-brave, though no mere coward, and ignorant, yet not unkindly, nor incapable of loyalty, and withal shrewd in what his limited vision can see when he is not blinded by his greed. The continual collisions of these two with. the real world make the story of Don Quixote. Cervantes had a fine inventive power, the adventures are numerous and varied, yet the charm lies not in the incidents, but in the reality and the sympathetic quality of the persons. We have no grinning world of masks made according to a formula. The country gentlemen, priests, barbers, shepherds, innkeepers, tavern wenches, lady's maids, domestic curates, nobles, and officials are living human beings, true to the Spain of the day no doubt, but also true to the humanity which endures for ever, and therefore intelligible to all times. In the midst is honest greedy Sancho with his peering eyes, so shrewd, and withal so capable of folly, the critic, and also the dupe of the half-crazed dreamer, by whom he rides, and will ride, as long as humanity endures, in this book, and under every varying outward form in the real earth. As for Don Quixote, is he not the elder brother of Sir Roger de Coverley, of Matthew Bramble, of Parson Adams, of Bradwardine, of Colonel Newcome, and Mr Chucks, the brave, gentle, not over-clever, men we love all the more because we laugh at them very tenderly ?1 1 The fame and the excellence of Le Diable Boiteux of Le Sage entitle the author of El Diablo Cojuelo to notice in this chapter. Luis Velez de Guevara (1572 or 1574-1644) of Ecija was a fertile dramatist. His Diablo Cojuelo, published in 1641, supplied the starting-point, and the matter but not the form, of the two first chapters of Le Diable Boiteux. There is nothing answering to the famous " Après cela on nous réconcilia; nous nous embrassâmes; depuis ce tems là nous sommes ennemis mortels." The matter of the Diablo Cojuelo is akin to the Visions of Quevedo, and the style is very idiomatic. 157 CHAPTER VI. SPAIN -HISTORIANS, MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS, AND THE MYSTICS. SPANISH HISTORIANS-HISTORIES OF PARTICULAR EVENTS-EARLY HIS- GÓMARA, OVIEDO, LAS CASAS, HERRERA, THE INCA GARCILASO-MEN- GENERAL HISTORIES ОСАМРО, SOLIS- - MIS CELLANEOUS WRITERS - GRACIAN AND THE PREVALENCE OF GÓN- It was natural that a very active time of great literary vigour should be rich in historians. Spanish literature is, indeed, fertile in historical narratives of contemporary events written by eyewitnesses, and not less in authoritative narratives, the work of almost contemporary authors. A people so proud of the present could not be indifferent to the past. The Spaniard least of all; for he is, in his own phrase, linajudo-proud of his lineage-not less concerned to show that he had ancestors than to convince the world of his greatness. Thus the sixteenth century, Spanish historians. and the early years of the seventeenth, saw the production of a very important Spanish historical literature. It followed the fortunes of the country with curious exactness. Every great campaign, every great achievement in America during the reign of Charles V., has been well and amply described. The reign of Philip II. is equally well recorded by contemporaries, and was the period of the great general histories of Morales, Zurita, and Mariana. But as the seventeenth century drew on, there was less and less which the Spaniard cared to record, till after the revolt of Catalonia and the separation of Portugal in 1640 we come to a period of entire silence. The exhaustion of the national genius was felt here as elsewhere. When the voice of Spanish history was last heard, it was in the conquest of Mexico by Antonio de Solis-the work of an accomplished man of letters who looked back over the disasters of his own time to the more glorious achievement of the past. Much of the historical writing of the great epochthe histories of religious orders, of which there are many, and of towns, of which there not a few, and genealogical histories, also numerous and valuable— does not, properly speaking, belong to literature. But it would be a very pedantic interpretation of the word which would exclude the Comentario de la Guerra de Alemaña1 of Luis de Ávila y Zuñiga. It is an account 1 This and most of the other works mentioned here will be found in the two volumes of Historiadores de Sucesos Particulares in the Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra, vols. xxi. and xxviii. many events. of the war of the Smalkaldian League, written by an eyewitness who served the emperor, and attended him in his retirement at Yuste. The merit of this, and other books of the same order, lies less in any beauty of style they possess than in the Historians of particular interest which attaches to the evidence of capable men who saw great events. Luis de Ávila is also valuable because he gives expression to that pride and ambition of the emperor's Spanish followers, who really dreamt that they were helping towards the establishment of a universal empire. Another writer of the same stamp, who lived when the fortune of Spain had reached its height and was beginning to turn, was Don Bernardino de Mendoza, a most typical Spaniard of his time. He was a soldier of the school of the Duke of Alva, a cavalry officer of distinction, was ambassador in England some years before the Armada, and in France during that great passage in history. He died at a great age, blind and "in religion," having lived the full life of a fighting pious Spaniard who could use both sword and pen. He wrote commentaries on the war in the Low Countries between 1566 and 1577, and a treatise on the Theory and Practice of War. The commentaries were published in 1592. The treatise had appeared in 1577. The great subject of the Low Country wars of a somewhat later period-1588-1599-was also treated by another Spaniard of the same stamp as Don Bernardino. This was Don Carlos Coloma, Marquis of Espinar, who also was both soldier, diplomatist (he came on an embassy to England in the reign of |