Again, it is contended that Mendoza, a grave and haughty noble, of the proudest family in Spain, who aspired to high place and power at Court, could hardly have written such a story, dealing with low life and vulgar people. But Mendoza was a man of varied accomplishments, of wide knowledge of life, unencumbered with the prejudices of caste and of singular literary gifts, who might have been one of the great authors of Spain had he not been content to be a great statesman. He had been trained for the Church, had been a student at Salamanca, and had served in the Spanish armies in Italy. He was thus thoroughly well equipped with all that was required to qualify him for loose literature. Moreover, as one who had been intended for the priesthood--a calling which he abandoned for soldiership--he could be no friend to the cloth, and was precisely the man to ridicule, as he has done, the abuses of the Church and the vices of the priests, even to caricature the _bulero_ and the hawker of indulgences. Lastly, there is this further circumstance in support of his claim that he was known to be a lover of popular literature, and had shown precisely the same literary talent, humour, and idiomatic grace which are characteristic of _Lazarillo_, in some acknowledged letters, still extant, in which he satirizes, with ample knowledge of their tricks and way of life, the _catariberas_--the needy adventurers and greedy office-seekers of the period. As to Ortega, whose claim, first put forth only as a piece of rumour--and, in such a case, of scandal--in 1605, and never since by any Spanish authority repeated--is it necessary to dwell on the absurdity of an ecclesiastic of his eminence writing a book against the vices of his own caste and assailing his own order--a book dealing with the lives of rogues and vagabonds--which had to be suppressed by the Church as soon as it appeared? Nor has M. Morel-Fatio been able to produce any scrap of Ortega's writing, of character and style like _Lazarillo_. Priests and monks have, indeed, in that age and in every other, produced much loose literature. It was a priest who wrote _La Picara Justina_, the dirtiest of its class. It was a Dominican monk who is charged with the authorship of the false Second Part of _Don Quixote_. Without occupying any more of my space on this subject, it is enough to repeat that the weight of testimony since the days of Nicolas Antonio, the learned and accurate author of the _Bibliotheca Hispana Nova_, to the present time, is in favour of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza as the author of _Lazarillo de Tormes_.