utterly forget who it is that utters these dazzling strains. Calderon's dramas and comedies are reckoned at 120, and his Autos, religious or sacramental pieces, generally performed by religious or civil corporations in the open air, are numbered at about seventy. In these plays abstract qualities take the place of living personages, and it is perhaps the greatest proof of Calderon's genius that he has by his brilliant poetry and serene religious feeling made some of even these acceptable to a modern reader. But while the drama and comedy and the picaresque novel had been thus developing themselves, a whole literature of quite a different kind had sprung up into favour, flourished, and died away. This consisted of the prose books of chivalry, and of the pastoral romances both in prose and verse. They are remembered now chiefly through mention of them in the pages of the immortal work, the "Don Quixote," of Cervantes, which crushed them for ever. The most celebrated of them was the "Amadis de Gaul," written probably at the end of the fourteenth century. The imitations of it were innumerable, each more wild, extravagant, more insipid, and in worse taste than the last. Of the pastoral romances the only one we need to note is the "Diana Enamorada," of Montemayor (1520-61), and perhaps the most successful after this is the "Galatea," of Cervantes himself, who could never entirely shake off the influence of the writings he delighted to satirize, and of which he was the literary executioner. The one Spanish book which has become really European, in a degree which has been attained by no other purely secular work, is the "Don Quixote" of this author (1547-1616). Into this extraordinary production, under the guise of the adventures of his hero, the last of the knights-errant, with his squire, Sancho Panza--a story full of mirth, incident, and humour--Cervantes has put all the wisdom which, by his observation on mankind and literature, he had collected during a singularly varied life as writer, soldier, seaman, Algerine slave, poet, and man of business. Though hardly belonging to the school of the classical Renaissance, yet we see in Cervantes a specimen of the marked and distinguishing excellence of the men at that time--the width of their sympathies; so that each more eminent man seemed to contain in himself an epitome of the experience of mankind. It is, perhaps, to this many-sidedness of his experience, and of his culture, that is owing the genial character, the pathetic humour, and the total absence of bitterness in this masterly satire. Thus Cervantes, while laughing down and extinguishing for ever the absurdities of the chivalrous and pastoral romances, yet retains his sympathy for all that was really noble, though exaggerated, in them. His "Don Quixote," though moving irrepressible laughter, will for ever remain one of the choicest representations of a brave, pure-minded, honourable gentleman, and tears