quaint graceful fancy, and also the oddity of the English writer; but it is possible that his sententious antithetical style had some share in producing euphuism. Guevara is also worth notice as an early, though not the earliest, example of the pretentiousness and the tendency to wordy platitude which have been so fatal in Spanish literature. He had knowledge both of books and the world, and some command of sarcasm. These qualities were, however, swamped in the “flowing and watery vein” of his prose style. No writer ever carried the seesaw antithetical manner to a more provoking extent. To make one phrase balance another appears to have been his chief aim, and in order to achieve this end he repeated and amplified. In his own time, when whatever was at once sound as moralising, learned, and professedly too good for the vulgar was received with respect, Guevara had a wide popularity both in Spain and abroad. To-day he is almost unreadable, and for a reason which it is easy to make clear. It is known that La Fontaine took the subject of the _Paysan du Danube_ from the _Golden Epistles_ indirectly if not directly. Spaniards may be found to boast that there is nothing in the fable which is not in their countrymen. This is partly true, but it is stated in the wrong way. The accurate version is that there is nothing in Guevara’s prose which is not in La Fontaine’s verse, but that it is said in several hundred times as many words, and that the meaning (not in itself considerable) is smothered in tiresome digressions and amplifications. [SN: _The influence of the Inquisition._]