passed since the Moors had been driven from Granada. It would indeed be surprising if in Cervantes' work we found no sign of Eastern influence. 'I tell it you,' quoth Sancho of his tale, 'as all stories are told in my country, and I cannot for the blood of me tell it in any other way, nor is it fit I should alter the custom.' Many characteristics of Cervantes' narrative remind us that he was writing in a country only recently freed from the Moors, and in a time when it took the united forces of Venice, Spain, and the Papacy to beat the Turks at sea. [Oriental story-telling.] Cervantes is not ignorant, for example, of the literary trick of letting his heroes quote from the poets, after the engaging, erudite manner of the heroes of the _Arabian Nights_. Sancho Panza's conversation is an anthology of those short wisdom-laden maxims that had been the staple of Hebrew and Arabic literature. 'Set a hen upon an egg'; 'While a man gets he never can lose'; 'Where there is no hook, to be sure there can hang no bacon'; shrewd Ali and careful Hakim exchange such sentences to-day in the market-places of the East. But these are small things and beside the main point. I want to suggest that Cervantes had caught, whether in his Algerine prison, or in his Morocco-Spanish Spain, the yarning, leisurely, humanity-laden, unflinching atmosphere of Oriental story-telling. The form of the _nouvelle_, Eastern in origin, had been passed on from Naples to Paris and to London, without noticeable improvement, but it seems to me that now in Spain it met the East again, and was accordingly recreated. It is just the element of Eastern narrative, accidental in the genius of Cervantes, that makes his examples of that form so infinitely more important than those of the English Elizabethans. Scott told Lockhart that the reading of the _Exemplary Novels_ first turned his mind to the writing of fiction, and in Scott there is precisely the mood of uninterruptible story-telling that Cervantes shares with the Princess Scherazada.