Yet while noting that Italian models were profusely imitated in Spain and Portugal, and that Castilian was perfected as a literary instrument by Italian influence, we can still maintain that the Renaissance bore less fruit in the Peninsula than in France or England. By “fruit” we ought to mean not mere writing, be its mechanical dexterity what it may, but that combination of form and matter which makes literature, and which before we can call it “national” must savour of the qualities of some one race. Now, when we look at the literary activity of the Peninsula during the Golden Age, we can find very little which will stand the triple test in matter, form, and national character, and of which we can yet say that it shows the spirit of the Renaissance. Portugal can be left aside with the due passing salute to the great name, and the real, though hardly proportionate, merit of Camoens. What else we find there[122] is no more than a somewhat weaker version of the learned poetry of Spain, of which it has to be said that it might be deducted without reducing the place of Spanish literature in the world. All men who have written well are entitled to their honour. They were skilful workmen, and that too in no mean matter. Yet there is a wide difference between the man of whom we can say that if he had never taken pen in hand, his form and his matter might yet be found in equal perfection elsewhere and in foreign tongues, and that other of whom we are bound to say that if he had remained silent then something would have been missing which no other race could have supplied. Now, if Boscan had never taken the advice of Navagiero, if Garcilaso had never written, if all the learned poets had remained silent, then Spain would not have shown her capacity to produce men who could handle Italian metres competently--and yet her place in the literature of the world would be essentially what it is. The _Celestina_, from which, through the _Novela de Pícaros_, came Le Sage and Smollett and Dickens, would remain, and so would the _Amadis of Gaul_, the _romances_, the _comedia_, _Don Quixote_, the great adventurers, and Santa Teresa--all in short that makes Spain in literature.