“Hold this for certain and for fact, For truth it is and truth exact, That never Honor and Disgrace Together sought a resting-place.” It is not easy to imagine any thing more simple and direct than this story, either in the matter or the style. Others of the tales have an air of more knightly dignity, and some have a little of the gallantry that might be expected from a court like that of Alfonso the Eleventh. In a very few of them, Don John gives intimations that he had risen above the feelings and opinions of his age: as, in one, he laughs at the monks and their pretensions;[116] in another, he introduces a pilgrim under no respectable circumstances;[117] and in a third, he ridicules his uncle Alfonso for believing in the follies of alchemy,[118] and trusting a man who pretended to turn the baser metals into gold. But in almost all we see the large experience of a man of the world, as the world then existed, and the cool observation of one who knew too much of mankind, and had suffered too much from them, to have a great deal of the romance of youth still lingering in his character. For we know, from himself, that Prince John wrote the Conde Lucanor when he had already reached his highest honors and authority; probably after he had passed through his severest defeats. It should be remembered, therefore, to his credit, that we find in it no traces of the arrogance of power, or of the bitterness of mortified ambition; nothing of the wrongs he had suffered from others, and nothing of those he had inflicted. It seems, indeed, to have been written in some happy interval, stolen from the bustle of camps, the intrigues of government, and the crimes of rebellion, when the experience of his past life, its adventures, and its passions, were so remote as to awaken little personal feeling, and yet so familiar that he could give us their results, with great simplicity, in this series of tales and anecdotes, which are marked with an originality that belongs to their age, and with a kind of chivalrous philosophy and wise honesty that would not be discreditable to one more advanced.[119] [116] Cap. 20. [117] Cap. 48. [118] Cap. 8.--I infer from the Conde Lucanor, that Don John knew little about the Bible, as he cites it wrong in Cap. 4, and in Cap. 44 shows that he did not know it contained the comparison about the blind who lead the blind.