The pícaro was long in coming. The Cid promised him in the twelfth century, and the romancero on the eve of the age of Isabel. The genial Juan Ruiz, archpriest of Hita, in 1300 came close to his spirit in the graphic form ... a mingled piety and license ... of his great _Libro de buen amor_. Fernando de Rojas who began _La Celestina_ in 1499 did not create the pícaro only because he created something deeper. Like _Don Quixote_ at the end of the cycle, _La Celestina_ ere its beginning transcends the pícaro and contains him. Now come the Castilian versions of Amadís de Gaul. The spirit of errant adventure waxes so strong that it invades the hagiographa: Spaniards of the age of Carlos read histories of the saints fully as marvelous and picaresque as the profaner tales in the library of Don Quixote. Finally, after these ages of annunciation, the pícaro arrives, full-fleshed. His name is Lazarillo de Tormes: his date is 1554: his author is unknown. In this pattern of antithesis whose symphony is Spain, the response to Santa Teresa is the procuress of Rojas, the Celestina, that most tender, robustious, scoundrelly, womanly woman. The response to the flame-like San Juan de la Cruz is Lazarillo. San Juan personifies Spain’s purpose, which is divine. Lazarillo embodies Spain’s methods, which are brutal. San Juan is not abstract: he is an embodiment of purpose. Lazarillo is not mere flesh: in his trickeries and thefts, there is an inverted consciousness of Spain which makes his path through Old and New Castile almost as luminous as the path of the saint. This consciousness is marked by irony: and irony is in the weave of every picaresque design. For the Spanish rascal is no mere reaction from heroic gesture. He is reversion as well. He is moved by the same energy that has uprisen in the forms of asceticism and crusade. His antiphony is but a subtle swerving back from the life he wars on, to Spain’s common base. The pícaro has the resource, the intensity, the method, of conquistador and crusader: he preys on his own land. He has the passionateness of the saint: it is directed toward woman. He is a casuist like the Jesuit: his aim is to filch a purse. He navigates uncharted wastes like Columbus: to fill his belly and to save his skin. This continuous awareness of Spain’s noble world, this subtle swerve transforming it into villainy and lust, make the ironic pattern. The low tricks of the pícaro, weaving through the high fabric of his land, once more limn Spain in her fullness.