led them to skepticism, and whose selfishness induced them to welcome a change which brought them out of the narrow confines of a small community, and opened up a wider world to them. Their hearts had never been with Judaism, and they had adhered to it only out of respect or a certain compunction. To them, forced baptism was a relief from chafing fetters, a welcome coercion to overcome scruples which had always sat lightly upon them. For their own advantage they simulated devotion to Christianity, but were on that account neither better nor more religious men. The unscrupulous among them found special pleasure in the persecution of their former religion and its followers. To gratify their malice, they brought charges against rabbis and other representative Jews, or any member of the community, thus endangering the existence of the whole body of Jews in the country. It was bad enough that the latter had been robbed of so many able and learned men --physicians, authors, poets--and that the church had been enriched by their wealth and intelligence; but these very forces were used to inflict further mischief on the Jews that had remained steadfast. Knowing the faults of their former brethren, the converts could easily attack them. Don Pero Ferrus, a baptized Jew, made the community and rabbis of Alcala the target for his ridicule. In a poem he represents himself exhausted from want of sleep finding repose at last in the synagogue of this town, when suddenly he is disturbed, and scared away without mercy by "Jews with long beards and slovenly garments come thither for early morning prayer." A sharp rejoinder to this effort of Ferrus' "buffoon tongue" was put forth by a Jewish poet in the name of the Alcala community. Spanish poetry reaped considerable advantage from these passages at arms. Verse, up to that period starched, solemn, and stately as the punctilious ceremonial of the Madrid court, in the hands of Judæo-Christian satirists acquired the flexibility, wit and merriment of neo-Hebraic poetry at its best. This tone and style were gradually adopted by Christian poets, who borrowed expressions from Jewish writers to give point to their epigrams. Not only the apostate, the monk, Diego de Valencia, used Hebrew words in lampoons on the Jews, but the same practice was adopted with surprising dexterity by the Christian satirist, Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino, the "poet prince" of his day. A malicious critic might have been inclined to say that Spanish poetry was in process of being Judaized.