Lazarillo is but the first of a long line. The book that tells of him has scarce a hundred pages: yet it seems wide and deathless as the land from Salamanca to Toledo which its hero crosses. Lazarillo is a lad born of poor but unworthy parents. A blind beggar teaches him how to survive as a rascal in a rascally world. The young virtuoso outdoes his master. He becomes the servant of a starving, haughty knight, of a parsimonious churchman, of a shrewd and lecherous canon with whom he makes a treaty which includes the sharing of his wife. Lazarillo encounters Spain; and the land grows alive at his touch. Disorder, corruption, folly beneath the façade of splendor. But now, an acute principle synthetizes the chaos: the pícaro like a wistful agent of intelligence, envelops Spain and makes Spain one with pity. This pity is of a new order, among the emotions of art. It is neither mystical nor sentimental. It is the child of a modern autonomy: it is the pity of reason. The author of Lazarillo does not insist. He has created an engine so revealing that he can afford to rest within his quiet prose. He writes a tiny book: plastic portraiture, tender and bitter humor, sweet spirit, dark flesh--all Spain indeed is in it, as is the tree in the seed. Lazarillo is a seed, from which has sprung a forest. In Spain, the picaresque merges quickly with profounder worlds; loses its æsthetic sharpness, and has its share in the birth of a book which is a Scripture: _Don Quixote_. The true form shrinks to formula. The symbol of the rogue, preying on society and so divulging it, is exploited by minds more analytic than creative. In the hands of such masters as Quevedo, the pícaro becomes a concept of pessimism: a chemic force with which to test and to destroy the world. The pícaro voyages to France. But in Le Sage and Marivaux (to name but the greatest), the physical and intellectual movements of the rogue are stressed. France veers backward toward Scapin--toward the scamp of the classic comedy--whose essential difference is great. England borrows more deeply. The pícaro’s animal joyousness, social revelation, bitterness turned sentimental come back to life in Smollett, Fielding, Sterne. But they unite in no one work comparable with _Lazarillo_. Even De Foe wants the luminous poetic atmosphere whereby the crass materials of the tale have their dimension.