"It pleased God to accomplish my desire and his together, for when as I had begun my meat, as he walked, he came near to me, saying: 'Lázaro, I promise thee thou hast the best grace in eating that ever I did see any man have; for there is no man that seest thee eat, but seeing thee feed, shall have appetite, although they be not a-hungered.' Then would I say to myself, 'The hunger which thou sustainest causeth thee to think mine so beautiful.' Then I trusted I might help him, seeing that he had so helped himself, and had opened me the way thereto. Wherefore I said unto him, 'Sir, the good tools make the workmen good: this bread hath good taste, and this neat's-foot is so well sod, and so cleanly dressed, that it is able, with the flavour of it only, to entice any man to eat of it.' 'What? is it a neat's-foot?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Now, I promise thee it is the best morsel in the world: there is no pheasant that I would like so well.' 'I pray thee, sir, prove of it better and see how you like it.'... Whereupon he sitteth down by me, and then began to eat like one that hath great need, gnawing every one of those little bones better than any greyhound could have done for life, saying, 'This is a singular good meal: by God, I have eaten it with a good stomach, as if I had eaten nothing all this day before.' Then I, with a low voice, said, 'God send me to live long as sure as that is true.' And, having ended his victuals, he commanded me to reach him the pot of water, which I gave him even as full as I had brought it from the river.... We drank both, and went to bed, as the night before, at that time well satisfied. And now, to avoid long talk, we continued after this sort eight or nine days. The poor gentleman went every day to brave it out in the street, to content himself with his accustomed stately pace, and always I, poor Lázaro, was fain to be his purveyor." Written in the most debonair, idiomatic Castilian, _Lazarillo de Tormes_ condenses into nine chapters the cynicism, the wit, and the resource of an observer of genius. After three hundred years, it survives all its rivals, and may be read with as much edification and amusement as on the day of its first appearance. It set a fashion, a fashion that spread to all countries, and finds a nineteenth-century manifestation in the pages of _Pickwick_; but few of its successors match it in satirical humour, and none approach it in pregnant concision, where no word is superfluous, and where every word tells with consummate effect. Whoever wrote the book, he fixed for ever the type of the comic prose epic as rendered by the needy, and he did it in such wise as to defy all competition. Yet ill-advised competitors were found: one, who has the grace to hide his name, at Antwerp, continuing Lázaro's adventures by exhibiting the gay scamp as a tunny, and a certain Juan de Luna, who, so late as 1620, converted Lázaro to a sea-monster on show.