unsuccessful through their destitution and despair. The national inclination to the sins of pride, idleness, and boastfulness--how could it happen but that it should be enormously fostered and heightened by the easy conquests in America, following upon the shrinking of the martial power and the prodigious swelling of the ecclesiastical? With nearly ten thousand monasteries and nunneries, and more than thirty thousand monks, of the two orders, Franciscan and Dominican, alone--is it a wonder that the Spain of Philip III. should be hastening to decay? The _picaro_ was the fungus which grew out of this mass of corruption. To these running sores was added the expulsion of the Moriscoes under Philip III.--an act of cruelty equally base, barbarous, and stupid, of which the direct consequences were an increase in the cost of life, the stagnation of trade, and the decline of industry, commerce, and agriculture. The blow which reduced the forces of national industry by nearly a million of honest, hardy, thrifty, and skilful workmen, could not but lead to a great increase of poverty, of vice, and of disorder. On this waste, and out of this rottenness, fattened and throve exceedingly the rank weed _picaro_. The _gusto picaresco_, of which _Don Pablo de Segovia_ is the purest expression, arose in Spain upon the decay of the so-called romance of chivalry. Indeed, the first book in that kind, _Lazarillo de Tormes_, was published when the chivalric romance was in full blast, fifty years before _Don Quixote_ was written; nor is there any evidence to show that the author was actuated by a spite against the prevailing fashion. On the contrary, if the author was, as I presume he was, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, we know that he was a fond admirer of _Amadis_, taking only that book with him and _Celestina_--that curious tragi-comedy, which was, in some sense, a forerunner of the _picaresque_ novel--when despatched to the Eternal City as ambassador of Charles V. There was a close connection between the romantical books of the later period and the earliest of the _picaresque_ stories. The _picaro_, in fact, is the direct descendant and the legitimate child of the debased knight-errant. The public were beginning to get weary of the endless histories of the knights-adventurers--all equally puissant and valorous--and longed for common food. It was not the adventurers, however, of which people were sick, but of the dull and stupid books which pretended to tell of their exploits. Whatever chivalry there was in Spain had died out before the blighting influence of the Second Philip--that antithesis incarnate of all romance. The taste for low life was a natural and to a great extent a healthy reaction from the unwholesome diet, miscalled romance and of chivalry, on which the people had fed. The successor of the knight-errant, the _picaro_, was a good deal like the last of the line preceding, with much the same features. He was more picturesque than the