Cervantes himself might have written Teresa's _Book of the Foundations_. Certainly he never wrote a better book. For myself I have read Teresa's _Foundations_ twice at any rate for every once I have read Cervantes' masterpiece. For literature, for humour, for wit, for nature, for photographic pictures of the time and the people, her _Foundations_ are a masterpiece also: and then, Teresa's pictures are pictures of the best people in Spain. And there was no finer people in the whole of Christendom in that day than the best of the Spanish people. God had much people in the Spain of that day, and he who is not glad to hear that will never have a place among them. The Spain of that century was full of family life of the most polished and refined kind. And, with all their declensions and corruptions, the Religious Houses of Spain enclosed multitudes of the most saintly men and women. 'I never read of a hermit,' said Dr. Johnson to Boswell in St. Andrews, 'but in imagination I kiss his feet: I never read of a monastery, but I could fall on my knees and kiss the pavement. I have thought of retiring myself, and have talked of it to a friend, but I find my vocation is rather in active life.' It was such monasteries as Teresa founded and ruled and wrote the history of that made such a sturdy Protestant as Dr. Johnson was say such a thing as that. _The Book of the Foundations_ is Teresa's own account, written also under superior orders, of that great group of religious houses which she founded and administered for so many years. And the literature into which she puts all those years is literature of the first water. A thousand times I have been reminded of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as I read Teresa's account of her journeys, and of the people, and of the escapades, and of the entertainments she met with. Yes, quite as good as Cervantes! yes, quite as good as Goldsmith!--I have caught myself exclaiming as I read and laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks. This is literature, this is art without the art, this is literary finish without the labour: and all laid out to the finest of all uses, to tell of the work of God, and of all the enterprises, providences, defeats, successes, recompenses, connected with it. The _Foundations_ is a Christian classic even in Woodhead's and Dalton's and David Lewis's English, what must it then be to those to whom Teresa's exquisite Spanish is their mother-tongue!