The same people which was gathering proverbial wisdom into such collections as _Blooms of Philosophy_ and _Mouthfuls of Gold_, affected tales with a moral. _Count Lucanor_ consists of stories, told by a minister to a prince according to the Oriental machinery, which are meant to do more than amuse. They have the credit of being the first collection of novels, if we may call them such, in modern Europe. Scattered _fabliaux_ existed in France, and various tales were current in Italy, but there was as yet no _Decameron_. The extent to which portions of this early fiction filtered into England cannot very well be estimated, but in the neo-Latin countries, with their comparative nearness of language and traditions, their racial affinities and their common church, the tales enjoyed a large vogue, which brought them into the hands of the French composers of _fabliaux_, of Boccaccio’s Italian predecessors, of Boccaccio himself, and thence of Chaucer. The plot of one of Don Manuel’s stories is familiar to us through the _Taming of the Shrew_, and on the Continent some of them reappear in the dramas of Calderon, or the novels of Lesage. Nor was the circulation of the proverbs confined to Spain. In Caxton’s _Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers_, translated from the French, there appear aphorisms which correspond to those in the Spanish Florilegia. * * * * * The next step in Spanish literature consists of the prose “Chivalric Romances,” or _libros de caballerias_, of which the existence is best known to the ordinary reader through the derision showered upon them by Cervantes in _Don Quixote_. The only exception which he makes is in the case of their parent, the original _Amadis of Gaul_ (or _Wales_), as being the best book in this kind, and deserving of preservation as an example of a type. This _Amadis_, derived from Welsh sources, appeared early in the fourteenth century, but enjoyed its greatest popularity during the fifteenth. Elsewhere in western Europe the age of chivalry had already passed, but in Spain the spirit lingered. The _Amadis_ romances, with their peculiar blend of Celtic knightly self-devotion and the semi-Oriental fondness for magical and other marvels, were entirely to the Spanish taste. About the original _Amadis_ and some of its imitations, despite their extravagant conception of knightly honour and knightly prowess, and their lack of all reality of time, place, and circumstance, there is a certain tone or temper of nobility which redeems them from entire contempt. Beyond this the sequels to _Amadis of Gaul_, such as _Palmerin_, _Palmerin of England_, and _Amadis of Greece_, possess no literary virtues. They are simply more or less ingenious variations of one another, employing much the same figures and much the same situations. Their knights-errant are totally unreal, and move with much prolixity in an unreal world, of which the chief elements appear to be love and sorcery.