[180] Marcos Garcia, “La Flema de Pedro Hernandez, Discurso Moral y Político,” Madrid, 1657, 12mo. The author was a surgeon of Madrid, and wrote “Honor de la Medecina”; and another “Papelillo,” without his name, which he mentions in his Prólogo. (Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. II. p. 83.) He shows, at the beginning of his “Flema,” that he means to imitate Quevedo; but he has a good deal of _cultismo_ in his style. For the meaning of “Flema,” see Covarrubias, _ad verb_.--One more trifle may here be mentioned; the “Desengaño del Hombre en el Tribunal de la Fortuna y Casa de Descontentos, ideado por Don Juan Martinez de Cuellar,” 1663. It is a vision, in which the author goes to the house of “Desengaño,”--that peculiarly Castilian word, which may here be translated _Truth_. He is led afterwards to the palace and tribunal of Fortune, where he is disabused of his errors concerning all earthly good. The fiction is of little worth, and the style is that of the school of Góngora. The person, however, who, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, succeeded best in this style of composition, as well as in tales of other kinds, was Francisco Santos, a native of Madrid, who died not far from the year 1700. Between 1663 and 1697, he gave to the world sixteen volumes of different kinds of works for popular amusement;--generally short stories, but some of them encumbered with allegorical personages and tedious moral discussions.[181] The oldest of the series, “Dia y Noche en Madrid,” or, as it may be translated, Life in Madrid, though a mere fiction founded on manners, is divided into what the author terms Eighteen Discourses. It opens, as such Spanish tales are too apt to open, somewhat pompously; the first scene describing with too much elaborateness a procession of three hundred emancipated captives, who enter Madrid praising God and rejoicing at their release from the horrors of Algerine servitude. One of these captives, the hero of the story, falls immediately into the hands of a shrewd and not over-honest servant, named Juanillo, who, having begun the world as a beggar, and risen by cunning so far as to be employed in the capacity of an inferior servant by a fraternity of monks, now undertakes to make the stranger acquainted with the condition of Madrid, serving him as a guide wherever he goes, and interpreting to him whatever is most characteristic of the manners and follies of the capital. Some of the tales and sketches thus introduced are full of life and truth, as, for instance, those relating to the prisons, gaming-houses, and hospitals, and especially one in which a coquette, meeting a poor man at a bull-fight, so dupes him by her blandishments, that she sends him back penniless, at midnight, to his despairing wife and children, who, anxious and without food, have been waiting from the early morning to have him return with their dinner. This little