short, and leaves its hero dishonourably married, with a promise of a continuation, which was never written by the author. [SN: _Guzman de Alfarache._] Putting aside spurious “second parts” of the _Lazarillo_, the next event in the advance--we cannot say the development--of the _Novela de Pícaros_ is the publication of the _Guzman de Alfarache_ of Mateo Aleman, a Sevillian of whose birth, life, and death nothing certain is known. This book, appearing just as the _Libros de Caballerías_ were dying of exhaustion, set the example to a swarm of followers. Yet it was itself but an imitation of _Lazarillo_, greatly enlarged, and over-burdened with what Le Sage, who translated it, most justly called “superfluous moral reflections.” The second title of the book, _La Atalaya de la Vida_--‘The Beacon of Life’ indicates Aleman’s didactic intention, which even without it is obtrusive. But a beacon of life, to be other than a useless blaze, must be set to warn us off real dangers in real life: it must flame with satire on possible human errors. The satire of Aleman is akin to Marston’s, and Marston’s many followers among ourselves,--it is a loud bullying shout at mere basenesses made incredible by being abstracted from average human nature, and kneaded into dummies. Celestina, besides being an impudent, greedy servant of vice, is also a woman with humour and an amusing tongue. Her household are the scum of the earth, but they are human scum, with a capacity for enjoying themselves as men and women without dragging their humour of vice in, when no cause sets it in motion. They can laugh and cry, like and dislike, as other human beings do. But the personages of Mateo Aleman are grinning puppets, galvanised to imitate the gestures of greed, cowardice, mendacity, and cruelty, abstracted from humanity. Then, they are set to play a wild fantasia _in vacuo_. What is true of Mateo Aleman applies equally to his followers. [SN: _Followers of Mateo Aleman._]