Neither the popularity nor the decline of the _Libros de Caballerías_ was in the least unintelligible. These books supplied the Spaniards with stories of fighting and adventure in a fighting adventurous time, when the taste for reading, or at least hearing others read, was spreading, and when the theatre--the only possible rival--was still in its feeble beginnings. And what they gave was not only suited to the time but not inferior to what came after. The English reader who wishes to put it to the test has an easy way open to him. Let him take the adaptations which Southey made of _Amadis of Gaul_, or _Palmerin of England_, and compare them, not with Sir Walter Scott, who showed what a great genius could do with a motive not unlike that of the _Libros de Caballerías_; not with _Gil Blas_, which shows what genius could do with the machinery of the _Novela de Pícaros_; not with _Don Quixote_, which is for all time,--but with an English version of the _Guzman de Alfarache_, the book which first firmly established the _gusto picaresco_ at the very close of the sixteenth century. He will find much repetition (though Southey, who made one or two notable additions, has suppressed largely) in both, but in the _Guzman_ it is endless sordid roguery, in which there is no general human truth, and in place of it a mechanical exaggeration of a temporary form of Spanish vagabondage, while in the _Amadis_ or _Palmerin_ it is something not unlike the noble fancies of the Arthurian legend. [SN: _The real cause of their decline._]