It would, however, be an error to suppose that, during this period of romance and pastoral, literature made no approach towards real existence. When war has come to play a smaller part in the national interest, and when reading is becoming general, a country which loves stories and “situations” will begin to find material for them in the facts, or at least the possibilities, of real life. It was so with Spain. In the latter part of the fifteenth century appears the first instalment of non-romantic or non-chivalric literature in the shape of _Calisto and Meliboea_, better known as _Celestina_, a work of uncertain authorship. A prose “comedy,” though impracticable for the stage, and written in twenty-one so-called acts, it sets forth—ostensibly with a dissuasive moral purpose—a tale of intrigue and vice which might conceivably belong to the realities of contemporary Spain. “Realistic,” indeed, it cannot be called, since realism describes things strictly as they are. The work was translated in all western Europe, including England. The fact that in the early sixteenth century the productions of Spain found ready access to our own country will be considered later. Meanwhile it is most convenient to note the subsequent history of the Spanish novel of common life. That history was peculiar, but intelligible. Spain was growing weary of the monotonous pretences of the Amadises, and it was by the treatment of the most opposite type of humanity that the liveliest interest could be evoked. From the knight-errant to the rogue-errant was a grateful change. The country possessed a plenty of _picaros_ or rogues, who lived by the exercise of their wits, and whose adventures might be embellished into stories at least as interesting as those of a Palmerin. The appearance of _The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, his Fortunes and Adventures_ (1554)—a work of unknown authorship, though commonly attributed to Mendoza—marks the date at which such stories first take shape as a distinct branch of the novel, to be known as the “picaroon” or “picaresque.” From that time, for nearly a century, the “Novelas de Picaros” are a chief product of Spanish writing. In them the vagabond of low life is carried by his cunning and his luck through a multitude of such adventures as the Spanish mind considered humorous, even though they might not be particularly edifying. Unfortunately the hero and his history tend to become as stereotyped as those of the chivalric romance; and unhappily also many of the situations at which contemporary Spain could evidently laugh, are, to us, rather productive of pity or disgust. Chief among the progeny of _Lazarillo_ are _Guzman de Alfarache_ (1599), a sequel to _Lazarillo_ itself by Luna (1620), and _The Life of Buscon_ (otherwise entitled _The Great Knave_) by Quevedo (1626). All these were quickly translated into English. Upon England the effect of the picaresque novel first appears in the _Jack Wilton_ of Nash, who was