The _entremes_--interlude or farce--was by nature a slight thing. In the _Dos Habladores_--‘The Two Chatterers’--of Cervantes we have the simple story of a gentleman who is plagued in the streets by a ragged gabbler of insufferable fluency. He makes several attempts to shake him off without success, but at last sees how to make use of him. Sarmiento, the pestered gentleman, has a talkative wife. He takes the bore home, introduces him as a poor relation, and sets him at her. Roldan the chatterer drives the woman frantic by torrents of talk which leave her no chance to speak. The merit of the piece on the stage lay no doubt in the opportunity it presented for “patter” and comic acting. Yet the _entremeses_--not this one only, but the whole class--have great literary interest as storehouses of vivid, richly coloured, familiar Castilian. A drama which flowered for a century, and was so productive as the Spanish, cannot be fully illustrated by six examples. Yet these may serve to show the reader what he may expect to find there. Much he will not find, or will find only in passing indications. Perfection of poetic form in the verse is too rare; the more than human beauty of the Elizabethan lyric, the “mighty line,” whether of Marlowe, Shakespeare, or Corneille, the accomplishment of Molière or Racine, are wanting. The personages are constantly recurring types, with here and there a humour. The Juan Crespo of Calderon’s _Alcalde de Zalamea_ stands almost alone among the characters of the Spanish stage as a being of the real world fixed for us by the poet. What has been called the _au delà_ of Molière, and what is found in the very greatest masters--the something which transcends the mere action before us, and is immortally true of all human nature--is not on the Spanish stage. But there is much good verse, easy, with a careless grace, and spirited in Lope, or stately with a peculiar Spanish dignity in Calderon; there is a fine wind of romance blowing all through, and there is ingenious, unresting, yet lucid action. If it never reaches the highest level of our Elizabethan drama, neither does it fall to the vacant horseplay which is to be found side by side with the tragedy of Marlowe or Middleton. And though this essentially theatrical drama cannot be said to have held the mirror up to nature, yet it does give a picture of the time and the people, adapted and coloured for the boards, but still preserving the likeness of the original. This may be said to be its weakness. Spanish dramatic literature is so much a thing of Spain, and of the seventeenth century, that it must needs appeal the less on that account to other peoples and later times. None the less the spectacle is picturesque in itself, while the great theatrical dexterity of the Spanish playwrights will always make their work interesting to all who care for more than the purely literary qualities of drama. The religion of the Spaniard is conspicuous in his plays. It has been said