With the pride of a genuine Spaniard he seeks his examples in the _refranes_, the proverbs and proverbial phrases. He makes free use of the collection formed in the fifteenth century by the Marquess of Santillana, who gathered the traditional sayings “from the old women sitting round the hearth.” Váldes may be held to have given evidence in support of his own belief in the maturity of the language. The Castilian of the _Diálogo_ has very little in it that is antiquated, and where it differs from the modern tongue it is in being more terse and manly. His literary doctrine, which is rather indicated than expounded, would have commended itself to our Queen Anne men. To be simple and direct, to avoid affectation, to prefer at all times the natural and straightforward way of saying what you have to say--that is the advice of Juan de Váldes. Withal, he has no squeamish dislike of the common, when, as in the case of his beloved proverbs, it is also pure Spanish. The principles of Váldes might have been fatal to a stately and embroidered eloquence (of which Castilian has in any case no great store), but they would preserve a literature from the affected folly of Góngorism on the one hand, and from the grey uniformity of general terms, which was the danger incident to the classic literature of the eighteenth century. Váldes, who cited Garcilaso with praise, would not have agreed in many things with Cristobal de Castillejo, but he would have applauded his saying that Castilian is friendly to a “cierta clara brevedad”--to a certain lucid brevity. We shall be better able to judge later whether the recognition of this truth does not lead directly to agreement with Mr Borrow, when he says that Spanish Literature is not wholly worthy of the language. [SN: _The prose of the early sixteenth century._] Lucid brevity is certainly not the quality to be noted in Spanish prose-writers of what we may call the time of preparation--the earlier sixteenth century. The quality may indeed be found in an eminent degree in the writings of Spaniards who were not men of letters--in the despatches of Cortes, or in the numerous extant narratives of soldiers or priests who were eyewitnesses of the wars of Italy, of the sack of Rome, or of the conquest of America. It would be easy to make an excellent collection of stories of adventure from their letters, which would show the masculine force and the savoury quality of Castilian. But these were men of the sword, or churchmen as adventurous as they--not men of letters who knew by what devious paths the Muses should be approached. The prose-writers of this epoch as a class need not detain us in what must be a brief outline portrait of Spanish literature. There is, however, one exception in Antonio de Guevara, the Bishop of Mondoñedo (_d._ 1545), who is best known to us as the author of the once famous _Golden Epistles_, if only for the sake of the influence he may have had on Lyly.[4] Guevara wants, indeed, the