The romances of chivalry, like the institutions on which they were founded, lingered long in Spain. Their grave fictions were suited to the air of the stern old castles with which the Moorish contest had studded large portions of the country, while their general tone harmonized no less happily with the stately manners which the spirit of knighthood had helped to impress on the higher classes of society, from the mountains of Biscay to the shores of the Mediterranean. Their influence, therefore, was great; and, as one natural result of its long continuance, other and better forms of prose fiction were discountenanced in Spain, or appeared later than they might have done under different circumstances;--a fact to which Cervantes alludes, when, even at the opening of the seventeenth century, he complains that Spanish books of the latter character were still rarely to be found.[57] [57] Don Quixote, Parte I. c. 28. Fifty years, however, before that period, signs of a coming change are perceptible. The magnificent successes of Charles the Fifth had already filled the minds of men with a spirit of adventure very different from that of Amadis and his descendants, though sometimes hardly less wild and extravagant. The cruel wars unceasingly kept up with the Barbary powers, and the miseries of the thousands of captives who returned from Africa, to amaze their countrymen with tragical stories of their own trials and those of their fellow-sufferers, were full of that bitter romance of real life which outruns all fiction. Manners, too,--the old, formal, knightly manners of the nobility,--were beginning to be modified by intercourse with the rest of the world, and especially with Italy, then the most refined and least military country of Christendom; so that romantic fiction--the department of elegant literature, which, above every other, depends on the state of society--was naturally modified in Spain by the great changes going on in the external relations and general culture of the kingdom. Of this state of things, and of its workings in the new forms of fiction produced by it, we shall find frequent proofs as we advance. * * * * * The first form, however, in which a change in the national taste manifested itself with well-defined success--that of _prose pastorals_--is perhaps not one which would have been anticipated even by the more sagacious; though, when we now look back upon its history, we can easily discover some of the foundations on which it was originally built.