English lovers, I believe, seldom practise what in Spain is called conjugating the verb; they do not spend hours ringing the changes on I love, you love, we love. This, in their opinion, would be to protest too much. They prefer the method of Paolo and Francesca: they will sit reading out of the same book, and when they come to the kissing, she will say, "How nice that is!" and he will reply, "Isn't it?" and the story will supply the vicarious eloquence of their love. Fiction and poetry, in some supposititious instance, report for the Englishman the bashful truth about himself; and what English life thereby misses in vivacity, English literature gains in wealth, in tenderness, in a rambling veracity, and in preciousness to the people's heart. 36 A CONTRAST WITH SPANISH DRAMA In classical Spanish drama the masks are few. The characters hardly have individual names. The lady in Calderon, for instance, if she is not Beatriz will be Leonor, and under either name so superlatively beautiful, young, chaste, eloquent, devoted, and resourceful, as to be indistinguishable from her namesakes in the other plays. The hero is always exaggeratedly in love, exaggeratedly chivalrous, and absolutely perfect, save for this heroic excess of sensitiveness and honour. The old father is always austere, unyielding, perverse, and sublime. All the maids in attendance possess the same roguishness, the same genius for intrigue and lightning mendacity; whilst the valet, whether called Crispin or Florin, is always a faithful soul and a coward, with the same quality of rather forced humour. No diversity from play to play save the diversity in the fable, in the angle at which the stock characters are exhibited and the occasion on which they versify; for they all versify in the same style, with the same inexhaustible facility, abundance, rhetorical finish, and lyric fire. Why this monotony? Did Spanish life afford fewer contrasts, less individuality of character and idiom, than did the England of Shakespeare? Hardly: in Spain the soldier of fortune, the grandee, peasant, monk, or prelate, the rogue, beggar, and bandit were surely as highly characterized as anything to be then found in England; and Spanish women in their natural ardour of affection, in their ready speech and discretion, in their dignity and religious consecration, lent themselves rather better, one would think, to the making of heroines than did those comparatively cool and boylike young ladies whom Shakespeare transmuted into tragic angels. I think we may go further and say positively that it was Spain rather than England that could have shown the spectacle of "every man in his humour."