It was in Spain that the Counter-Reformation was most zealous. Although the influence of the Italian Renaissance had reached her, she had rejected its pagan aspects. On the one hand, her rulers jealously guarded their title of “Catholic Majesty.” On the other hand, the released energies of the country had been largely directed to the commercial conquests, opened up by the discovery of America, which encouraged that self-reliance and absorption in self that were characteristic of the Spanish temperament. Spaniards had upheld the Faith in their long contest with the Saracen intruders and still considered themselves the Champions of Christendom. Meanwhile, the intellectual activity inspired by the Renaissance gave them renewed belief in themselves and established them in their interest in the affairs of their own life. Typical alike of the Spanish race and of the effect upon it of the Renaissance is the “Don Quixote” of Cervantes, whom Symonds ranks with Ariosto, Rabelais, and Shakespeare as the four supreme literary exponents of the Renaissance. For each of these caught the spirit of the Renaissance when it was at the first freshness of its vigour in their respective countries and, instead of using it to imitate the past, captured its imagination into the vernacular of his own language, making it a most flexible and vital medium for the expression of the spirit of his own time and country. In Cervantes’ case the racial humour punctured with ridicule the affectations into which the old order of Chivalry had degenerated. That the new attitude toward life which it indirectly advocated, failed to be realised by the Spaniards may be attributed to two causes. One is the Counter-Reformation which rallied the forces of reactionism and the other, the easily gotten wealth that poured into the country from the New World. The one, associated with Monarchical absolutism, destroyed political progress, while the other swamped initiative and the vigorous handling of life, resulting in both moral and economical decadence. Yet the inherent raciness of the Spanish people could not be entirely suppressed. It declared itself especially in the prolific, versatile, truly national drama of Lope de Vega and Calderon, which pictured the life of the people with a variety and richness that have been surpassed only by Shakespeare. Moreover, after an apprenticeship of the Spanish painters to the works of Raphael and other Italians, the seventeenth century produced the greatest of all naturalistic painters in the person of Velasquez. Nevertheless, despite certain brilliant exceptions, it was the tragedy of Spain that at the moment, when her Renaissance was approaching fulfilment, it was strangled. FRENCH RENAISSANCE