In the course of an introduction to a translation of Shakespeare’s plays by Señor Clarke, Don Juan Valera (himself the author of stories both Spanish and good) has made a complaint, which is of the nature of an unconscious confession. He has lamented that the characters of Spanish drama are so little known. An artist, so he says, has only to paint a young man in a picturesque dress on a rope-ladder, with a beautiful young woman on a balcony above him, and all the world recognises Romeo and Juliet. If he takes his anecdote from Lope and Calderon, nobody will be able to guess what it is all about. With less than his usual good sense, Señor Valera accounts for the obscurity into which the world has been content to allow the characters and scenes of the Spanish drama to fall, by the political decadence of his country at the end of the seventeenth century. Yet the passing away of Spain’s greatness has not prevented Don Quixote and Sancho from being familiar to the whole world. If anecdote pictures are to be the test, Cervantes has no reason to fear the rivalry of the English dramatic poet. There is less of Spanish pride than of its ugly shadow, Spanish vanity, in Don Juan Valera’s explanation. The Drama of Spain, brilliant as it was within its limits, is not universally known, because it does not give what we find in Cervantes, and in boundless profusion in Shakespeare, characters true to unchanging human nature, and therefore both true and interesting to all time. It is mainly a drama of situation, and of certain stock passions working through personages who are rarely more than puppets. We may say the same of the prose stories, whether Libros de Caballerías, or Novelas de Pícaros--Books of Chivalry, or Tales of Rogues. They all have the same matter and the same stock figures. They differ only in the degree of dexterity with which the author has used his material. In the poetry of Spain we see two influences at work--first, the Italian Renaissance, which ruled the learned poetry of the school of Garcilaso; and then the native “romance” or ballad poetry, which held its ground beside the more varied and splendid metres imitated from abroad. Each of these, within its own bounds, is very uniform, and the works of each school vary only according to the writer’s greater or less mastery of what he uses in common with all others. Such a literature is manifestly best treated by classes and types. Cervantes, indeed, stands apart. His greatness is not a towering superiority but a difference of kind. It is as individual as the greatness of Velasquez in painting. [SN: _The division into native and imitative._]