predisposed to find something in him of the signs of exhaustion. He closes the time when the Spaniards wrote for themselves, and also wrote well. [SN: _Miscellaneous writers._] Before closing this survey of the great period of Castilian literature by a notice, which must necessarily be brief, of one intensely national body of writers, some words must be said about the large class of authors of miscellaneous books belonging to the first half of the seventeenth century. The press was active in those years. Unfortunately it was an age of oddity and extravagance. [SN: _Gracian and the prevalence of Góngorism._] Its dominating figure is that Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658) to whom the admiration of Sir M. Grant Duff among ourselves, and the whim, if not the cynicism, of Schopenhauer among the Germans, have given a limited revival of popularity in our own time. He was an Aragonese Jesuit, who published his books under the name of his brother Lorenzo. Gracian is not uninteresting as a finished example of all that bad taste and pretentiousness can do to make a man of some, though by no means considerable, faculty quite worthless. It was his chosen function to be the critic, prophet, and populariser of Góngorism. He wrote a treatise to expound the whole secret of the detestable art of saying everything in the least natural and perspicuous manner possible.[55] This _Agudeza y Arte de Ingenios_--‘Wit and the Wits’ Art’--was not written till he had published a book on _The Hero_ to show that he had every right to speak with authority. Gracian was otherwise a copious writer. His _Criticon_, translated into English under the name of _The Spanish Critic_, by Paul Rycaut in 1681, about thirty years after it appeared, is an allegory of life, shown by the adventures of a shipwrecked Spaniard and a “natural man,” whom he finds on the island of St Helena. It may have helped Swift by showing him how not to write _Gulliver’s Travels_. The work which has been revived of late by the freak of Schopenhauer is the _Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia_--‘Hand (or Pocket) Oracle and Art of Prudence.’ It is a collection of maxims. Mr Morley went to the extreme limit of good nature when he said that Gracian sometimes gives a neat turn to a commonplace. As a rule, his maxims are examples of all that maxims ought not to be--long, obscure by dint of straining after epigrammatic force, and in substance of platitude all compact. We soon find that we are dealing with a “haberdasher of small wares,” who is endeavouring to impose himself upon us as wise by dint of a short obscure manner and a made-up face of gravity.