The mere bulk of the Spanish stories was great, but it is subject to many deductions before we can disentangle the permanently important part. Pastorals, for instance, were much written in Spain, and one, the _Diana_[37] of Jorge de Montemayor (1520?-1561?), is excellent in its insipid kind. But they were and could be only echoes of Sannazzaro. In estimating the literature of any nation we can afford to pass over what it has only taken from a neighbour with a notice that the imitation was made. The merit of creating the type, be it great or little, belongs to the original. Even when an imitator is himself widely read, as was the case with Montemayor, he is but carrying on the work of the first master. Short stories, again, were popular enough in Spain; but to a large extent they, too, were imitations. The _Patrañuelo_--‘The Story-Teller’--of Juan de Timoneda, or the _Cigarrales de Toledo_ of Tirso de Molina, are full of the matter of the _Fabliaux_ and the Italian _Novelli_.[38] What the Spaniard did which was also a contribution to the literature of Europe was done neither in the pastoral nor in the short story, but in the long tale of heroic or of vulgar adventure. His are the _Libros de Caballerías_--‘Books of Knightly Deeds’ which are the parents of the true modern romance; and the _Novelas de Pícaros_, or, ‘Tales of Rogues,’ the counterpart, and even perhaps a little the burlesque of the first, are the ancestors of all the line which comes through _Gil Blas_. Then his was _Don Quixote_, which belongs to no class, but is at once universal and a thing standing by itself, a burlesque of the _Libros de Caballerías_ which grew into a sadly humorous picture of human delusion, and was also an expression of the genius of Miguel de Cervantes. The books of Chivalry, or of Knightly Deeds, which is perhaps the more accurate translation of the Spanish plural _Caballerías_, like the Romances, cannot be said to belong to the literature of the Renaissance. They were a survival of the Middle Ages, the direct successors of the _Romans d’Aventures_, which had sprung from the _Chansons de Gestes_. The Arthurian stories of Lancelot and of Merlin were known to the Spaniards, and had an enduring popularity by the side of their own Tales of Chivalry. There is even one book belonging in essential to the school which certainly preceded the _Amadis_. This is the Valencian _Tirant lo Blanch_, written in Catalan, of which the first three books are the work of Juan Martorell, and the fourth was added by Mosen Juan de Galbá, at the request of a lady, Isabel de Loriz. It was printed in Valencia in 1490, was translated into Spanish, though with suppressions, and had the rather curious fortune to be published in a French version in 1737 by a gentleman whose own name was not unworthy of a _Libro de Caballerías_, A. C. P. Tubières de Grimoard de Pestels de Levi, Count of Caylus.