Cervantes' Barber, classing the book as "the best in that kind," saved it from the holocaust, and posterity has accepted the Barber's sentence. _Amadís_ is at least the only chivalresque novel that man need read. The style is excellent, and, though the tale is too long-drawn, the adventures are interesting, the supernatural machinery is plausibly arranged, and the plot is skilfully directed. Later stories are mostly burlesques of _Amadís_: the giants grow taller, the monsters fiercer, the lakes deeper, the torments sharper. In his _Sergas de Esplandián_, Montalvo fails when he attempts to take up the story at the end of _Amadís_. One tedious sequel followed another till, within half a century, we have a thirteenth _Amadís_. The best of its successors is Luis Hurtado's (or, perhaps, Francisco de Moraes') _Palmerín de Inglaterra_, which Cervantes' Priest would have kept in such a casket as "that which Alexander found among Darius' spoils, intended to guard the works of Homer." Nor is this mere irony. Burke avowed in the House of Commons that he had spent much time over _Palmerín_, and Johnson wasted a summer upon _Felixmarte de Hircania_. Wearisome as the kind was, its popularity was so unbounded that Hieronym Sempere, in the _Caballería cristiana_, applied the chivalresque formula to religious allegory, introducing Christ as the Knight of the Lion, Satan as the Knight of the Serpent, and the Apostles as the Twelve Knights of the Round Table. Of its class, _Amadís de Gaula_ is the first and best. From an earlier version of _Amadís_ derives the _Cárcel de Amor_ of Diego San Pedro, the writer of some erotic verses in the _Cancionero de burlas_. San Pedro tells the story of the loves of Leriano and Laureola, mingled with much allegory and chivalresque sentiment. The construction is weak, but the style is varied, delicate, and distinguished. Ending with a panegyric on women, "who, no less than cardinals, bequeath us the theological virtues," the book was banned by the Inquisition. But nothing stayed its course, and, despite all prohibitions, it was reprinted times out of number. The _Cárcel de Amor_ ends with a striking scene of suicide, which was borrowed by many later novelists.