With those Spaniards, then, the novel approached some sort of rendering of life and that sort of rendering was soon enough to make its appearance in England. It crossed the Bay of Biscay and the Channel with a picaresque work of a prodigious popularity in its day--_Guzman d’Alfarache_ or the _Story of a Rogue_. Less picaresque in the true sense of being the strung-together life of a _picaro_ or professional thief--less picaresque than the immortal _Lazarillo de Tormes_ and less achingly tragic as a presentation of the life of the brothel and wine-shop than _Celestina_, the work of Hermann Alemannos, whose name betrays his Teutonic origin, was much more suited to the Anglo-Saxon taste than either one of the other three Spanish books that I have selected for mention. The true Spanish genius is for us obviously too austere. Our public could, it is true, guffaw over the discomfitures of the knight of the Woeful Countenance and the manœuvre by which Lazarillo gets rid of his blind master who himself was the most ferocious of scoundrels; and the suicide from the tower in _Celestina_ may have excited disagreeable emotions in the English reader who preferred to think that punishment for sins was a matter of the hereafter. But the remorseless, essentially Spanish black and white of the greater novels was no more for the English public or the English litterateur than are _Titus Andronicus_ and _Pericles_ when they can get the _Comedy of Errors_ or the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. _Guzman d’Alfarache_, on the other hand, was a wilderness of enormous passages of trite morality enlivened here and there with episodes of cozening and purse-cutting and it has always been a matter of speculation to me--for I have known these works ever since I was a very small child--to what extent the seventeenth-century public really liked the moralizings, to what extent it was merely hypocrisy, and to what extent, again, readers were really tricked by the tiny ha’-pennyworth of sack into consuming the intolerable quantity of very dry bread. Obviously in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mere length was not a deterrent, because there was an immense amount of time for vacant minds to fill in and relatively very few books. So that just as in distant colonies we will read home newspapers with all the advertisements they contain three and four times over, so the subjects of the James’s, Charles’s, and early George’s would accept almost anything that could be read or listened to and probably from being attuned to prolixities they would have disliked anything crisp if anything crisp had been to be found.