the reign of Queen Elizabeth, as in the reign of King Edward VII, was passing into a larger sphere of use, and Sidney, following Castiglione, was a kind of schoolmaster at Court, eager to teach the new industrialism the culture of the old feudalism. At a somewhat tedious length, with conscious, selective artifice, in the deliberate manner of Montemayor and Sannazzaro, and with the interspersed lyrics which confess the origin of the prose-pastoral in poetic eclogue, Sir Philip Sidney did at least try to transport Arcadia to Tudor England, and to prove, however tentatively, that Arcady, like Heaven, lies within us.

It is difficult to establish these conclusions. The winding course of Sidney's Arcadia does not facilitate quotation, and the comparative methods of Sidney and his predecessors would require illustration from other Arcadies. We may remark the negative feature, to be observed, too, in Montemayor, of the absence of magic and faëry from this pastoral romance : an economy of material which obviously points to the development of the novel in the modern sense out of the romance in the old. No small part of such development was contributed by Sidney's extension of the mere story-interest in his narrative. He multiplied the number of female characters, and diversified their parts. He invented the first Pamela in English fiction, thus showing the way to Samuel Richardson, Maria Edgeworth, and later novelists. His plot, though confused and hard to follow, contained threads of real human conflict, which were utilized by the playwrights of the morrow; and he commanded resources of colour, in relief of the monotony and insipidity which oppress Bohemians in Arcadia,

As might be expected in a book written under the lee of Lord Pembroke's country-seat and in the

spacious times of Queen Elizabeth, the Arcadia is full of happy phrases, anticipating the Attic age of English prose—

'It seemed that Mars had begotten him upon one of the Muses'.

Oppressed with being loved almost as much as with loving'.

'The causes of their joys were far different; for as the shepherd and the butcher may both look upon one sheep with pleasing conceits, but the shepherd with mind to profit himself by preserving, the butcher with killing him '. . . .

And we may note the authentic sound of romance, long since vanished in feeble echoes through keepsakes, albums, and the like, in such a passage as the following

'Then the black knight, invited by the willing countenance of the princess, abasing his helmet, advanced more fearfully than to a battle, to kiss her hand, when Zelmane courteously retired Philoclea a little distance from thence, as glad to confer with her, as to give her friend occasion to confer with Pamela, who presently, whilst the roses of his lips made a flower of affection with the lilies of her hands',

It was the grand style of courtly demeanour which Sir Philip Sidney recommended to his contemporaries, and which he bore on the fatal field of Zutphen. Its intimate association with real life distinguished the purpose of Arcadia from novels of the Amadis type in Spain.

Court-romance, thus plenteously cultivated, brought an antidote in its train, and it is to Spain, again, in the first instance that we look for the low-life romances which at last drove out Court-romance.

Lazarillo counterbalanced Amadis. We first hear of little Lazarus, or Lazarillo, in 1554, when editions of the anonymous Vida (the Life) de

LAZARILLO DE TORMES

were published at Alcalà, Burgos, and Antwerp. The name and some of the adventures have been traced to earlier sources, and the status of rogue, or picaro, whence the picaresque novel derives its epithet, was known in fiction, as we saw, to the old Archpriest of Hita and to the author of Celestina. But no priority in invention of detached episodes or phrases detracts from the full originality of this anonymous prose anti-romance; and, whatever the rogue's descent, he ascends through various changes, at which we shall pause in due course, from Lazarillo de Tormes to Le Sage, Fielding, and Dickens.

Lazarillo is the autobiography of a soldier of fortune, the crown of whose sordid career was his appointment as town-crier of Toledo. The fiction corresponded to reality. The chevalier d'industrie was a real person in the land, at the time when Sir Philip Sidney and kindred idealists were teaching the Courts of the Renaissance to adapt the old tunes to new voices. Thoughtful Spaniards, watching disabled soldiers beg their way from door to door, were beginning to count the cost and to scrutinize the fruits of empire. They were taking stock after the war; and in this mood of realism and disillusion the coat of chivalry was turned inside out. Little Lazarus and his followers wore the seamy side outwards. Like the sophists of old, they were at pains to make the worse seem the better side; and we have to await the insight of Cervantes for the true pity and humour of chivalry's decline. For all that Lazarillo made ugly and Sidney sought to postpone, Cervantes admitted and transfigured.

Meanwhile, rogues multiplied and prospered. The anonymous writer of Lazarillo was succeeded by

MATEO ALEMAN (1547-1614),

whose Part I of Guzman de Alfarache was issued in 1599, and Part II in 1604 (after a forged Part II by another writer). A promised third Part was never forthcoming. Aleman's Spanish Proteus', as Ben Jonson called Alfarache in a poem prefixed to the first English version 1, was a plausible picaro, who has been well described as a composite monster, at one time the respectable Aleman himself, at the next the embodiment of all that shocks him' 2. Lesage, in his French translation, 1732, omitted the 'moralités superflues' of this quick-change, Jekyll-and-Hyde adventurer; but in Spain, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, his versatility added to his popularity. It deeply consoled every new-made chevalier d'industrie to cite Aleman as his authority that he was a better fellow than he seemed, as much sinned against as sinning, and a parasite for which society was to blame. It added dignity to roguery to pose as a social problem, and undoubtedly the pose promoted sales. There were twenty-six editions of Alfarache during the first six years, and his character was recognized as so typical that the book became known as the Picaro, without reference to its particular title.

Lastly, we close our account of the expatiation of letters with a short sketch of the development of

DRAMA.

We noted on an earlier page the acute distinction of a Spanish critic between plays founded on knowledge (noticia; if Jonson's learned sock be on ') and plays

1 By James Mabbe, 1622.

⚫ E. Warner Allen, Celestina.

founded on fancy (fantasia; 'sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child'). This distinction will grow. It will lead ultimately to the difference, so glibly defined by Polonius (Hamlet, ii, 2), between the law of writ and the liberty', or the classical and the romantic stages. Writers a noticia, we may add, whether their knowledge was poured into elegant masques and pageants or into plays in the Latin tradition, when 'Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light', appealed directly to the patrons of court-lyric and learned wit, while writers a fantasia had to carve their own way by psychological insight and emotional power.

We meet this distinction on the English stage, between the plays of university wits, John Lyly and his associates, and the plays in public theatres of Christopher Marlowe and actors' companies. And we meet it at an earlier date in the course of the Spanish Renaissance. Take the contrast, for example, between Gil Vicente and Lope de Rueda. Vicente was a Portuguese poet who died in 1557. He wrote more than forty plays, some in Castilian, some in Portuguese, and some in a dialect compounded of both. They were all what we may call Naharro dramas: tragi-comedies or autos, halflyrical and half-dramatic, part-eclogue and partpastoral, and altogether cultivated and artistic. Lope de Rueda, on the contrary, who died about 1565, was a journeyman-promoter of the stage. His most eminent fellow-countryman, Cervantes, who was eighteen years old when Rueda died, and may well have seen him in the theatre, wrote of his performances as follows

'In the time of this celebrated Spaniard, the whole apparatus of a manager was contained in a large 1 See p. 198.