well acquainted with Spanish, and whose choice of a picaroon higher in the social scale than Lazarillo is merely a concession to contemporary English tastes and interests. In France the type passed through the hands of Scarron and reached those of Lesage, whose _Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_ were destined to eclipse the fame of the Spanish originals. From the example of France this species broke out in England with the _Moll Flanders_ and _Colonel Jack_ of Defoe, the _Joseph Andrews_ of Fielding, the _Roderick Random_ and _Peregrine Pickle_ of Smollett. In the nineteenth century it finds its congeners in the _Three Musketeers_ of Dumas and in the works of several minor English novelists. Mr. Jingle does not essentially differ from the type. It is commonly said that it was the ridicule of Miguel Cervantes which destroyed the vogue of the chivalric romances. In reality he is rather the embodiment of his epoch, dealing the _coup de grâce_ to that which was already dying. His immortal _Don Quixote_ appeared first in 1605, when Amadis and Palmerin had already been losing their hold for a generation. Cervantes himself began with a pastoral _Galatea_, but it is not to be wondered at that his characteristic satirical sense of reality diverted him from this vein to the writing of original novels. Some twelve of these “Novelas Exemplares,” or moral and instructive tales, were published in 1613, and, though of uneven quality, they are the nearest approach which Spain could show to a novel of actuality. Some of these were soon converted into plots for dramas by the later Elizabethan playwrights. _La Gitanilla_ becomes the _Spanish Gipsy_ of Middleton, and Fletcher’s _The Fair Maid of the Inn_ is from the _Illustrious Housemaid_. But the abiding fame of Cervantes rests upon work of an entirely novel kind, and one which has remained unique, despite all efforts at imitation. Though full of contemporary Spain, _Don Quixote_ is one of those immortal books which become the property of the world rather than of any particular country. Its happy conception and execution, its humour, its fine suggestion of the true gentleman, and its admirable style, combine to make Cervantes the one significant name in Spanish literature. _Don Quixote_, a poor gentleman of La Mancha, a true type of the Castilian with all his native dignity and ready acceptance of lofty views of honour and loyalty, has bemused himself—as so many others had done—with the reading of the _libros de caballerias_. Accepting the world of the chivalric romances as a real world, where wrongs and oppressions clamour for heroic knights to redress them, he saddles his gaunt mare, Rosinante, clothes himself in old armour, with a barber’s dish for helmet, and sallies forth to seek adventures. To him Cervantes attaches the necessary squire in the shape of Sancho Panza, a good-natured, ignorant peasant, endowed with a simple readiness to believe his betters, but also with a fund of vulgar shrewdness which