Saving your good pleasure, Master Cervantes, I would come to an issue with you regarding this. For though Palmerin of England is the best romance of those which recount the adventures of that line, still it does not bear away the bell quite so easily as you say. Indeed, its merits are not transcendently above those of its kind, and its faults are of the same character. Again, true Spaniard as you are, do you not praise it so greatly because you believe it to be the work of a king? And do you not demean yourself to the level of a newspaper critic when you doom to extinction those romances which you have not read? Further, as a Castilian gentleman, do you agree with the author's most despiteful entreatment of that sweet sex for whose sake all romances were written? No good knight, no good man, could have penned so many stupidities concerning their envy, their fickleness, their lack of reason, as he has done; and still worse, he has made them mere puppets, moving as the strings are pulled. For one thing I thank him, however--his character of the magician Doliarte, a wise sage dwelling in the Valley of Perdition, lost in contemplation of mysterious things. Nay, for a greater thing I have to thank him also, the colours of the marvellous, the intoxicating magic with which he has suffused his story; and if the rush of it, the spell of it, transported you to the forests of Faery and blinded you to the book's demerits, you are perhaps to be excused if your enchanted eyes refused to behold them and saw only the outward glamours of that rainbow world. CHAPTER VI: CATALONIAN ROMANCES Romances from a coast of love and wine, Echoing the music of adventurous swords, Murmur of necromancy's dark ingyne, And speech that holds the ghosts of curious words. The literary genius of Catalonia was unquestionably a lyrical one, as befitted a province so happily endowed by nature, clothed with the purple mantle of vineyards, and laved by the calm beauty of a dreamy ocean. Epic has her home in rugged and wind-swept lands, where the elemental trumpets of the air arouse the soul of man to fiercer song and fill the memory with the clash of war. But on sheltered strands, mellow with sun and painted in the ripe colours of plenty, a softer and more dreamy music mimics the æolian sound of the zephyrs which steal like melodious spirits through orchard and vineyard. Yet this province of the Trovadores was not without its legends of chivalric enterprise, and indeed produced two romances of such intrinsic merit that they may be regarded as occupying an unassailable position in the literature of the Peninsula. Partenopex de Blois