the servants of Calisto quarrel, a conflict ensues, in which Celestina loses her life. The law interferes, seizes upon the malefactors, and condemns them to the gallows. The friends of the servants agree to revenge their death. They beset the house, in which Calisto and his beloved have met again. Calisto, who wishes to encounter them, is slain. Meliboea, distracted with remorse and sorrow, and resolved not to survive her lover, ascends a lofty tower, and, after informing her parents of her errors, and of the death of him who shared them, precipitates herself from its summit. Such is the outline of this primitive effort of dramatic art, the eloquence of which is as various and astonishing as the plot is simple and inadequate. There are passages in it which may remind the reader of _Clarissa Harlowe_; and it is very possible that it may have suggested hints to Richardson. Bouterwek's remarks upon the _Celestina_ are trivial and insignificant. "I may boldly say it, because I have seen it," says Stephen Gosson, in 1581, writing under the influence of those puritanical feelings which were soon to play so conspicuous a part in our dramatic history, "that the _Palace of Pleasure_, the _Golden Ass_, the _Æthiopian History_, _Amadis of France_, and the _Round Table_, indecent histories in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked to furnish the playhouses in London." Robert Green, the author of _Friar Bacon_, one of the most eminent of Shakspeare's immediate predecessors, tells us that he had travelled in Spain. There are several expressions in Shakspeare which indicate an acquaintance with Spanish literature--among others, the remarkable phrase, "this is mischief malikin," which is evidently a corruption of "mucho malhecho." The origin of the _Taming of the Shrew_ is Spanish. The alternate rhymes of _Love's Labour_ Lost prove, beyond a doubt, a Spanish model. The advice from Polonius to his son is said to be a literal translation from a Spanish dramatist. The resemblance between _Twelfth Night_ and an anonymous comedy, _La Española in Florencia_, is too striking to be merely accidental. It is, indeed, most improbable that Shakspeare who was acquainted with French, and has inserted in his works--in the _Tempest_ for instance--several paraphrases of Montaigne, should have been ignorant of Spanish, which was not only a more popular language, but one which contained far more to reward and stimulate the labour of the student. And here we may observe, that the prodigy of the Spanish stage, Lope de Vega--the "monster of nature," as Cervantes calls him, and certainly the most surprising instance of the combination of facility and genius which the modern world has seen--was born on the 25th November 1562, at Madrid, two years before Shakspeare. If we pursue our examination of the influence of Spanish literature on the English drama, we shall find a close resemblance between Fletcher's