Perhaps other circumstances, besides a national feeling of unwillingness that romantic fiction should occupy the debatable ground between the Moors and the Christians, contributed to check its progress in Spain. Perhaps the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, destroying, by its ridicule, the only form of romance much known or regarded at the time, was not without an effect on the other forms, by exciting a prejudice against all grave prose works of invention, and still more by furnishing a substitute much more amusing than they could aspire to be. But whether this were so or not, attacks on all of them followed in the same spirit. “The Cryselia of Lidaceli,” which appeared in 1609,--and which, as well as a dull prose satire on the fantastic Academies then in fashion, bears the name of Captain Flegetonte,--assails freely whatever of prose fiction had till then enjoyed regard in Spain, whether the pastoral, the historical, or the chivalrous.[128] Its attack, however, was so ineffectual, as to show only the tendency of opinion to discourage romance-writing in Spain;--a tendency yet more apparent a little later, not only in some of the best ascetic writers of the seventeenth century, but in such works as “The Moral History of the God Momus,” by Noydens, published in 1666, which, as its author tells us distinctly in the Prologue, was intended to drive out of society all novels and books of adventure whose subject was love.[129] [128] “La Cryselia de Lidaceli, Famosa y Verdadera Historia de Varios Acontecimientos de Amor y Fortuna,” was first printed at Paris, 1609, 12mo, and dedicated to the Princess of Conti; besides which I have seen a _third_ edition, of Madrid, 1720. At the end a second part is announced, which never appeared. The other work of El Capitan Flegetonte is entitled “La Famosa y Temeraria Compañía de Rompe Columnas,” and was also printed in 1609, with two Dialogues on Love; all as poor as can well be imagined. The “Cryselia” is a strange confusion of the pastoral style with that of serious romance;--the whole mingled with accounts of giants and enchantments, and occasionally with short poems. [129] Benito Remigio Noydens was author of a number of moral and ascetic works. The “Historia Moral del Dios Momo” (4to, Madrid, 1666, 12mo) is an account of the exile of the god Momus from heaven, and his transmigration through the bodies of persons in all conditions on earth, doing mischief wherever he goes. Each chapter of the eighteen into which it is divided is followed by a moralizing illustration; as, for instance, (c. 5,) the disturbance Momus excites on earth against heaven is illustrated by the heresies of Germany and England, in which the Duke of Saxony and Henry VIII. appear to very little advantage.