A few words, and they need be very few, on the influence of the Inquisition seem not out of place in a history of any part of Spanish life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are even to be justified by the fact that its oppressive influence has been called on to account for the withering of the national will and intelligence, which dried up the very sources of literature. The prevalence of the destructive affectation called Góngorism has been excused by Mr Ticknor on the ground that men were driven back on mere playing with words because the Inquisition made thinking dangerous. But we are met at once by the problem of the Sufi pipkin. It is hard to tell which is potter and which is pot. Did the Spanish intellect wither because the Inquisition wrapped it in over-tight swaddling-clothes? or did the Spaniard first create and then submit to this repressive institution because he had little tendency to speculation? To judge by what went before and by what has come after the Inquisition, the second reading of the riddle is at least as plausible as the first. However that may be, it is difficult to see how the Inquisition is to be made responsible for the carelessness of form and the loquacious commonplace, which are the main defects of Spanish prose and verse, while it may fairly claim to have helped to preserve Spanish literature from one grave fault so visible in parts of our own. The Holy Office, which allowed Lope de Vega to write _La Esclava de su Galan_, would not have punished him for writing an _As You Like It_. Since it suffered Cervantes to create _Don Quixote_, it would not have burnt the author of a _Novela de Pícaros_, who had made his hero as real as Gil Blas. The Inquisition was no more responsible for the hasty writing of Lope than for his undue complacence towards the vices of his patron the Duke of Sessa. A literature which could produce _La Vida es Sueño_, _El Condenado por Desconfiado_, and the _Mágico Prodigioso_, had all the freedom necessary to say the profoundest things on man’s passions and nature in the noblest style. It was his own too great readiness to say “This will do,” and not the Inquisition, which prevented Tirso de Molina from making _La Venganza de Tamar_ as perfect in form all through as it is in one scene. The Church had no quarrel with perfection of form. It had, indeed, a quarrel with mere grossness of expression, and would certainly have frowned on many so-called comic scenes of our own Elizabethan plays. This was a commendable fastidiousness of taste not peculiar to the Spanish Church. The Spaniard may not be always moral, but he has seldom been foul-mouthed. In this, as in other respects, the Church spoke for the nation; but it was the effective administrative instrument which could coerce an offending minority into decency--and that we may surely count to it for righteousness. FOOTNOTES: