But both poets were not only the flowers of their time, but they were also the germs of the future. As Shakespeare, by the influence of his works, particularly on Germany and the France of to-day, is to be regarded as the creator of the later dramatic art, so must we honour in Cervantes the author of the modern novel. I shall allow myself a few passing observations on the subject. The older novels, the so-called romances of chivalry sprang from the poetry of the middle ages. They were at first prose versions of those epic poems whose heroes are derived from the mythical traditions of Charlemagne and the Holy Grail. The subject was always knightly adventures. It was the romance of the nobility, and the personages that figured therein were either fabulous, fantastic beings, or knights with golden spurs; nowhere an allusion to the people. These romances of knighthood, which degenerated into the most ridiculous absurdities, Cervantes overthrew by his _Don Quixote_. But while by his satire he destroyed the earlier romances, he also furnished a model for a new school of fiction, which we call the Modern Novel. Such is always the wont of great poets; while they tear down the old, they at the same time build up the new; they never destroy without replacing. Cervantes created the modern novel by introducing into his romances of knighthood a faithful description of the lower classes, by intermingling with it phases of folk-life. This partiality for describing the doings of the common rabble, of the vilest tatterdemalions, is not only found in Cervantes, but in all his literary contemporaries, and among the Spanish painters as well as among the poets of that period. A Murillo, who stole heaven's loveliest tints with which to paint his beautiful Madonnas, painted with the same love the filthiest creatures of this earth. It was perhaps the enthusiasm for art itself that made these noble Spaniards find equal pleasure in the faithful portrayal of a beggar lad scratching his head as in the representation of the Blessed Virgin. Or, perhaps, it was the charm of contrast that led noblemen of the highest rank, a dapper courtier like Quevedo, or a powerful minister like Mendoza, to fill their romances with ragged beggars and vagabonds. They perhaps sought to relieve the monotony of their lofty rank by putting themselves in imagination into a quite different sphere of life, just as we find a similar tendency among some of our German authors, whose novels contain naught else but descriptions of the nobility, and who always make their heroes counts and barons. We do not find in Cervantes this one-sided tendency to portray the vulgar only; he intermingles the ideal and the common; one serves as light or as shade to the other, and the aristocratic element is as prominent in it as the popular. But this noble, chivalrous, aristocratic element disappears entirely from the novels of the English, who were the first to imitate Cervantes, and to