Saumur itself becoming a headquarters of the "Reformed" creed. There abided of course the permanent features of life which make pilgrimage as deep-rooted as the love of children, and one of the epidemics of pilgrimage that occur periodically burst out in France about 1585, so Busbecq writes. Whole villages of people clothed themselves in white linen, took crosses and went off to some shrine two or three days' journey away. The special cause of this epidemic may perhaps be sought in the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Chartres by their queen, in 1582, to beg for relief from her barrenness. One incident of this journey ought not to be left buried in the Calendar of Foreign State Papers, the only place where it has hitherto been printed. On being told why the queen was going thither, a countrywoman said, "Alas! Madame is too late; the good priest who used to make the children has just died." An example of the pilgrim we have already met in Della Valle. Bartholomew Sastrow in his autobiography reveals a man travelling in search of work, a very unpleasant man, perhaps, but so strikingly true a picture of the every-day life and every-day thought of a lower middle-class man of the sixteenth century as not to be surpassed for any other century, past, present, or future, not even among autobiographies. But for the man who is trying to avoid work, the third of the mediæval types, the vagabond, it would be out of place to select an individual to stand for the class in Renascence days, seeing that it became a stock literary type; vagabondage in general being epitomized for the time in the Spanish picaro. The picaro was one who saw much of the seamy side of life and remembered it with pleasure—it was all life and the true picaro was in love with life. The only enemy he had permanently was civilisation; yet he and it became reconciled in his old age: a picaro who grew old ceased to be a picaro. Meanwhile he was always forgiving civilisation, and being forgiven; both had equal need of forgiveness. Yet there is one picaro characteristic hard to overlook—his passion for being dull at great length when he drops into print: Lazarillo de Tormes and Gil Bias being the only ones of whom it may be said that from a reader's standpoint they were all that they should have been and nothing that they should not. The rest, when met between the covers of a book, resemble the parson whom one of themselves, Quevedo's Pablos, caught up on the way to Madrid and whom he hardly prevented from reciting his verses on St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, fifty octavetts to each virgin; even then he could not escape a comedy containing more scenes than there were days in a Jerusalem pilgrimage, besides five quires concerning Noah's Ark. This same Pablos explains incidentally what his kind talked about to chance companions on the road, for meeting another making for Segovia they fell into "la conversacion propia de picaros." Whether