The first of these were valuable not only as all the ballads of Europe were valuable, not merely because of the diametrical opposition of their tone and spirit to that of the “classical” poetry, but because of their remarkable _differentia_ as ballads themselves. In the first place, they[339] are the only _Southern_ ballads available,—for Italy, though not infertile in folk-song, does not appear to have had any ballads proper, and those of Modern Greece are of very doubtful earliness, and were not known till long afterwards. In the second place, the part-Oriental part-African admixture, which makes _cosas de España_ so interesting and so powerful, appears in them to the full. And, lastly, there is a certain _largeur_ about them—a national quality, whether excited by conflict with Charlemagne or by conflict with the Moors, which is lacking in all other ballads known at least to the present writer. Even the split between North and South Britain is a case of mere family misunderstanding, compared with the secular stand of the great Peninsula, at bay against Christian invaders from the North and Paynim foes in the household. And it is not unnoteworthy that, with the exception of _Chevy Chase_, not one of the very best of ballads in English is inspired by the quarrel of Englishman and Scot. The influence of the Spanish drama and of the more or less conscious fight waged in Spain itself over its principles had also, especially in Germany, great play, and should have had greater. It reached a climax no doubt in the somewhat capricious and ill-informed, the certainly intemperate, will-worship of the Schlegels, which we have not yet discussed: but as we have seen, Lessing was aware of it, and there is no doubt that it had great effect on at least the “Sturmers-and-Drangers.” It ought, we say, probably to have had much more influence than it actually exercised; but with the decay of Spanish political power the study of the Spanish language had been steadily going out in Europe, never, as yet, to revive. The valuable and interesting Spanish critical discussions on the subject were almost unknown; and the theatre itself was never thoroughly studied, till the investigations of Schack, a German, and Ticknor, an American, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet it is not necessary to spend many words on showing the immense germinal and alterative power which this study had, and in particular the value which it possessed as seconding the influence of the English drama, with just sufficient difference to make the seconding a real reinforcement, and not a mere repetition of attack by the same troops. The obsession of the sealed pattern, the illusion of the undeviating rule, might in a Frenchman (for strongest instance) survive the reading, or at least the hearing, of the “barbarian” Shakespeare: but it must have been seriously shaken by such writers of a “polished” nation as Tirso, and Lope, and Calderon, not to speak of minors like Alarcon and Rojas.