The decline of the _Libros de Caballerías_ is easily accounted for. They ended by wearying the world with monotony, and the increasing extravagance of incident and language, which was their one resource for avoiding monotony. The Spaniard’s tendency to repeat stock types in the same kind of action was visible here as elsewhere. The _Amadis_ gave the pattern, and it was followed. A hero who is the son of a king, and is also a model of knightly prowess and virtues, with a brother in arms who, while no less valiant, is decidedly less virtuous, are the chief figures. Amadis, the Beltenebros--the lovely dark man--is the pink of loyalty to his peerless Oriana, who is the fairest and most loving of women. Galaor is gay and volatile, light of love, but loyal in friendship. Amadis is born out of wedlock, and left to fortune by his mother, or for some other reason brought up far away from the throne which is lawfully his, and fights his way to his crown without ever failing for an instant in his devotion to Oriana. Galaor helps him, and loves what ladies he meets on the road. Amadis breathes out his mistress’s name as he lays his lance in rest, Galaor throws a defiant jest in front of him; Amadis has the gift of tears, but Galaor laughs in the jaws of death, laughs in fact at everything except the honour of a gentleman--and on that he smiles. It is a brotherhood between Sir Charles Grandison and Mercutio. Combats, giants, fairy ladies, enchanters good and bad, make up the matter of the story. If it is essentially unwholesome, so is the Round Table legend; and if it is necessarily absurd, so is the _Faërie Queen_. But when it had been done once in _Amadis_, and for a second time in _Palmerin_, it was done for good. To take the machinery of the _Libros de Caballerías_, and put a new spirit into it, which, as Cervantes saw, was possible, was not given to any Spaniard. All they could do was to repeat, and then endeavour to hide the repetition by multiplying everything on a fixed scale. The giants grew bigger, the sword-cuts more terrific, the combats more numerous, the monsters more hideous, the exalted sentiments swelled till they were less credible than the giants. The fine Castilian of Garcia Ordoñez was tortured into the absurdities which bad writers think to be style. The _Libros de Caballerías_, which had been a natural survival, and revival, of the Middle Ages in the early sixteenth century, were unnatural at its close. _Don Quixote_ did but hasten their end. They would have perished in any case before the _Novelas de Pícaros_, which in turn ran much the same course, and were extinguished without the intervention of satire. That the taste of the time was tending away from the higher forms of romance is shown by the little following found for the _Civil Wars of Granada_ by Ginés Perez de Hita, of whom little or nothing is known.[40] This book, of which the first part was published in 1598 and the second in 1604, is