_Coloquio de los Perros_. In witty observation and ridicule of whole sections of society, Quevedo almost vies with Cervantes, though his unfeeling cynicism gives his work an individual flavour. His lost poets are doomed to hear each other's verses for eternity, his statesmen jostle bandits, doctors and murderers end their careers as brethren, comic men dwell in an inferno apart lest their jokes should damp hell's fires,—grim jests which may be read in Roger L'Estrange's spirited amplification. Quevedo's serious poems suffer from the _conceptismo_ which disfigures his ambitious prose; his wit, his complete knowledge of low life, his mastery of language show to greater advantage in his picaroon ballads and exercises in lighter verse. His freedom of tone has brought upon him an undeserved reputation for obscenity; the fact being that lewd, timorous fellows have fathered their indecencies upon him. A passage from his _Last Will of Don Quixote_ may be cited, as Mr. Gibson gives it, to illustrate his natural method:— "_Up and answered Sancho Panza; List to what he said or sung, With an accent rough and ready And a forty-parson tongue: ''Tis not reason, good my master, When thou goest forth, I wis, To account to thy Creator, Thou shouldst utter stuff like this; As trustees, name thou the Curate Who confesseth thee betimes, And Per Anton, our good Provost, And the goat-herd Gaffer Grimes; Make clean sweep of the Esplandians, Who have dinned us with their clatter; Call thou in a ghostly hermit, Who may aid thee in the matter.' 'Well thou speakest,' up and answered Don Quixote, nowise dumb; 'Hie thee to the Rock of Dolour, Bid Beltenebros to come!_'" Overpraised and overblamed, Quevedo attempted too much. He had it in him to be a poet, or a theologian, or a stoic philosopher, or a critic, or a satirist, or a statesman: he insisted on being all of these together, and he has paid the penalty. Though he never fails ignominiously, he rarely achieves a genuine success, and the bulk of his writing is now neglected because of its local and ephemeral interest. Yet he deserves honour as the most widely-gifted Spaniard of his time, as a strong and honest man in a corrupt age, and as a brilliant writer whose hatred of the commonplace beguiled him into adopting a dull innovation. It is not likely that his numerous inedited lyrics will do more than increase our knowledge of Góngora's and Montalbán's failings; but the two plays promised by Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo—_Cómo ha de ser el Privado_ and _Pero Vázquez de Escamilla_—cannot but reveal a new aspect of a many-sided genius.