Gracian is worth singling out, not for his merits, but because he so thoroughly typified a something in the Spaniard which, oddly mixed with his real humour and sound sense, gives him a leaning to the theatrical in the worst sense of the word. When Shakespeare drew Don Adriano de Armado, the fantastical Spaniard, he was not laughing at random at the foreigner. And this side of the people was never more conspicuous than in the middle seventeenth century. It came out everywhere, from serious treatises on politics down to the fencing-book of the egregious Don Luis de Narvaez de Pacheco. It was not that Spain wanted for able men. Diego de Saavedra-Fajardo, the author of the history of the Goths, and of a curious book of emblems called _Empresas Politicas_, or ‘The Idea of a Political Christian Prince’; Vera y Figueroa, the author of _The Ambassador_; Suarez de Figueroa, who wrote the miscellaneous critical dialogues called _El Pasagero_--‘The Traveller,’--were none of them insignificant men, but there was a perpetual straining after sententious gravity in them, an effort to look wiser than life, an attempt to get better bread than could be made out of wheat. They helped to give Europe the old idea of the rigid sententious Spaniard which is so strangely unlike the real man. But it was the time of the frozen court etiquette of the Hapsburg dynasty, and of grave peremptory manners in public, covering an extraordinary relaxation of morals, and an unabashed taste for mere horseplay in private. These writers gave the literary expression of the artificial Spain of the seventeenth century. It adds to the piquancy of the contrast that at a time when Spain was marching resolutely, and with her eyes open, to ruin, by accumulating fault upon fault, the political writers named here, and others, abounded in good sense. To take a single example. Among the emblems of Saavedra-Fajardo is one representing a globe supported between the sterns of two warships, with the motto “His Polis.” In the Essay the Spanish diplomatist sets out the whole doctrine, so familiar in our own days as that of “sea-power,” with great force. Yet this was written, a melancholy example of useless wisdom, when his country was destroying its last chance of maintaining a navy, by bleeding itself nearly to death in the wars of Germany for the purpose of vindicating the claims of the house of Hapsburg.