Even so marvellous an orator as Emilio Castelar was at times carried away by the magnificent eloquence that flowed unfailingly from his lips. In the same way Lope de Vega could throw off a play in a few days. Over 2000 plays and _autos_ are ascribed to him, and in the 450 that remain his most ardent admirers confess that there are arid tracts. And, ordinarily, this copiousness has been a fault, telling against Spanish literature, and it continues to be a fault: Señor Blasco Ibáñez writes his brilliant novels in evident haste; Señor Perez Galdós has entered on the fifth series of ten of his “Episodios Nacionales,” and his other novels and plays are very numerous. Such wealth of production could not but be harmful to critical judgment. In the nineteenth century Spain produced one or two excellent critics, especially Larra and _Clarín_, the pseudonym of Leopoldo Alas, author of “La Regenta,” one of the most striking psychological novels of the century. Generally, however, if German literary criticism is circular and, however illuminating the by-paths of its learning, wanders round the point without ever quite touching it, Spanish literary criticism is superficial, and either veils the point in a polite mesh of words, or is prevented by this very rhetoric from seeing the point at all. Even Valera, who so carefully limned his own prose, and whose verse, though not inspired, is always delicate and polished, was far from being a good critic. He praised effusively works that at best deserved silence, and this insincerity in literary matters is, it is to be feared, a common weakness in Spain. The characteristic of Spanish literature that unites it in a special bond of sympathy with English literature is its large store of humour. It meets us in the “Poema del Cid,” in the character of the Cid, and in the quick detection of the ludicrous; the poems of the Archpriest of Hita are full of merriment and of humorous portrayal of character; the humour of the Archpriest reappears in “Lazarillo de Tormes,” but without his jovial gaiety; with Quevedo its vein becomes cruelly satirical. Humour did not desert Luis de León when ill and solitary in the dark Valladolid prison of the Inquisition; and it is to be found in a large majority of Spanish authors, being but another side of their direct, unclouded observation. In the most humorous of all books, even Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sad Countenance, is constrained to laugh: at the sight of Sancho, we read, his melancholy was not strong enough to prevent him from joining in his laughter--and the whole world laughs with, not at him.