Though the popularity of the _Celestina_, not only in Spain but abroad, was great, it did not produce any marked effect on Spanish literature until a generation had passed. It was adapted on the stage, but there it left few traces except on the racy dialogue of the prose _entremeses_. The poetic form of the Spanish comedy did not, and even perhaps could not, adapt itself to the alert naturalistic tone of the _Celestina_, and the subjects of the plays grew ever more romantic and more remote from the vulgar world. But this answered too well to a natural taste of the Spaniards to remain without a following. [SN: _The_ Lazarillo de Tormés.] Its first real successor (apart from _rifacimentos_ or mere echoes, of which there were several) was the _Vida de Lazarillo de Tormés; sus Fortunas y Adversidades_,[43] attributed on very dubious evidence to the famous Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and with not much greater probability to Fray Juan de Ortega, of the Order of St. Jerome. The date of its composition is uncertain. The first known edition is of 1553, but it may have been read in manuscript before that. In the _Lazarillo_ we have the _Novela de Pícaros_ already complete, differing only from those which were to come after in the greater simplicity of its style and in freshness. The hero is a poor boy of Tormés, in the neighbourhood of Salamanca, none too honest by nature, and made perfectly unscrupulous by a life of dependence on harsh, or poverty-stricken, masters. The story tells how he passes from one service to another, generally after playing some more or less ferocious trick on his employer. It is a scheme which affords a good opening for satirical sketches of life, and the author, whoever he was, clearly adopted it for that among other reasons. Lazarillo’s master, the poor cavalier who keeps up a show of living like a gentleman while in fact he is starving at home--too proud either to work or beg, but not too proud to cherish schemes of entrapping a wife with a dowry, and not spirited enough to serve as a soldier--was no doubt a familiar figure in Spain, and he became a stock puppet of the _Novelas de gusto Pícaresco_. Another scene of real, though not peculiarly Spanish, satire deals with a dishonest seller of pardons and his sham miracles. The Reformation had imposed limits on the freedom of orthodox writers to deal with the sins, or even absurdities, of churchmen, and this passage was suppressed, as of bad example, by the Inquisition. The majority of the figures are, however, less satirical than grotesque. We find in the _Lazarillo_, though not to the extent which afterwards become common, the love of dwelling on starvation, poverty, and physical infirmities as if they were things amusing in themselves. But this is less the case than in its successors, and being nearly the first, or even the actual first, in the fully developed form, it has a certain freshness. It has the merit of being