had no progeny, and is to-day mainly interesting as an indication of the struggle of the national genius to find its true path. We cannot say even that of the few direct imitations of the classic form produced by the Spaniards. Such works as the _Nise Lastimosa_--the Pitiable Agnes--a strictly Senecan play on the story of Ines de Castro, first written in Portuguese by Ferreira, and then adapted into Castilian by Gerónimo Bermudez, a learned churchman, and printed in 1577, are simply literary exercises. They show that the influences which inspired Jodelle, and Garnier in France, were not unfelt in Spain; but there, as in England, the national genius would have none of them. In Bermudez himself the imitation of Seneca was forced. The _Nise Lastimosa_ has a continuation called the _Nise Laureada_. The first, which ends with the murder of Agnes, is correct; but in the second, which has for subject the vengeance of the king, he throws aside the uncongenial apparatus of messenger and chorus, and plunges into horrors, to which the story certainly lent itself, with the zest of his contemporary Cristobal de Virues, or our own Kyd. [SN: _Bartolomé de Torres Naharro._] The true successors of Juan del Encina were to be found during the reign of Charles V. in the Spanish colony at Rome. The Spanish proverb has it that the Devil stands behind the cross--“tras la cruz está el diablo”--and the Spaniards who lived under the shadow of the papal Court enjoyed a licence which they would have missed under the eye of the Inquisition. One of them, Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, who lived and wrote in the early years of the century, is sometimes counted the father of the Spanish stage. He was the author of a number of comedies, published in Seville in 1520 under the title of _Propaladia_, which deal with the favourite subjects of comedy, love intrigues, and the tricks of lovers, _rufianes_--_i.e._, bullies--soldiers in and out of service, and so forth, types which he had many chances of observing at Rome when all Italy was swarming with Spanish _bisoños_, the wandering fighting men who were mercenaries when any prince would employ them, and vagabonds at other times. Naharro had considerable _vis comica_, and a command of telling fluent verse. His personages have life, and if his plays have touches of obscenity, which is not common in Spain, and brutality, which is less rare, his time must be taken into account. But Naharro, though a genuine Spaniard, lived too near the Italians not to be influenced by Machiavelli and Ariosto. His plays mark only a short step forward to the fully developed comedy of Lope. The _Propaladia_ was soon suppressed by the Inquisition, not because it contained heresy, but for a freedom of language in regard to ecclesiastical vices which would have passed unrebuked in the previous century, but had become of very bad example after the Reformation had developed into a formidable attack on the Church. The form of his comedy was not