Chapter III: Book II: Chap. I (2)

Less innocent, perhaps, are some of Quevedo's other burlesque pieces, which neither gods, men, nor county councillors may allow. In these the poet sins, however, more from carelessness of humour than grossness of imagination. It is not his ideas that are nasty so much as his words which are coarse. He uses words at random, and is reckless of the effect produced, letting his fancy run away with his pen, to the detriment of his art. He is wanting in the exquisite simplicity and delicacy of the master of whose work he was a chief admirer, whose style he followed, and in whose path he attempted to walk--his friend, Miguel de Cervantes. So passionate was his love for _Don Quixote_ that we are told he would throw down the book in an ecstasy and declare that he would gladly burn all his works to be able to write something like _Don Quixote_. Between the two wits it is pleasant to record that there was nothing like jealousy. Cervantes, in the references he makes to Quevedo, seems to speak with more than his wonted kindliness of the younger man, as though from personal intimacy. In the _Voyage to Parnassus_ Quevedo is rallied upon his lameness with a freedom which only a friend might take. In summing up the roll of the good poets who are to be Apollo's allies in the winning of Parnassus, the name of Quevedo is last on the list. But Cervantes interrupts the god-messenger to remind him of Quevedo's infirmity:--

_Scarce can Francisco de Quevedo be_
_In time, I said. Nay, quoth he, on this cruise_
_I do not go, unless he go with me;_
_He is Apollo's son, son of the Muse_
_Calliope; we cannot, it is clear,_
_Go hence without him; I do not choose;_
_He is the scourge of all the poets drear,_
_And from Parnassus, at the point of wit,_
_Will chase the miscreants we expect and fear!_
_My lord, I said, his pace is most unfit,_
_He'll be a century upon the route!_
_Quoth Mercury: It matters not a whit;_
_For be the poet gentleman to boot,_
_Upon a dappled cloud, and through the air,_
_He shall be borne, his courtly taste to suit!_[1]

In the delightful prose appendix to the same poem, the _Adjunta al Parnaso_, Don Pancracio de Roncesvalles brings to Cervantes' house a letter from the god Apollo, dated the 22nd of July, 1614. In this there is another reference to Quevedo: _If Don Francisco de Quevedo hath not left for Sicily, where they await him, seize him by the hand and tell him he must not fail to visit me in a neighbourly way; for his late sudden departure gave me no time to talk with him._

Quevedo's worldly circumstances, as the owner of a landed estate, and his rank in the public service under the powerful Duke of Osuna, kept him, happily, free from that necessity of writing for bread which oppressed the fine genius but could not stifle the kind heart of the author of _Don Quixote_. But they did not preserve him from the envy of his other less fortunate brothers of the pen. With Lope de Vega, with whom he could have no rivalry, whom he survived ten years, his relations seem to have been tolerably friendly--that is to say, they exchanged compliments and commendatory sonnets. With Góngora there was too much similarity of humour to be much love. They had various tilts at each other, in which there was too much venom spilt for either to emerge with honour. When Góngora abandoned his early simplicity of style and took to that affected and extravagant way of writing which came to be called after him, _Gongorismo_, which corresponded to the disease called _Euphuism_ in England and _Marinism_ in Italy--Quevedo took up his lance against the intruder and in defence of the language, writing a pamphlet, _La Culta Latiniparla_, in which, under the guise of a catechism for the instruction of ladies of culture in the new way of speech, he quizzes his rival and the new invention very happily. A French critic and student of Spanish letters, M. Germond de Lavigne, in his account of Quevedo, has shown himself so far lost to the sense of humour as to call this piece _un discours critique litteraire_; which is as though we should class Swift's _Argument against the Abolition of Christianity_ among works of devotion. Quevedo's wit had little effect in checking the depraved fashion of writing; and it is sad to tell that he himself, in his later years, was infected with the barbarous taste, and Gongorized like the rest. Góngora bitterly resented the attack upon his style, and there passed between the two much dyslogistic verse in the shape of epigram and sonnet. Góngora relieves his feelings by a poem in which he charges his critic with being no great scholar, and with _wandering slow with heavy pace_--one who _sleeps in Spanish and dreams in Greek_--insinuating that he is unsound in his religion. In another sonnet Góngora sneers at his critic's learning, his limping gait, and his blindness, laughs at his red cross of Santiago, and his adventures, calling him _borracho_ (drunkard), _pedante gofo_ (stupid pedant), _muy crítico y muy lego_, &c. Quevedo retorted with equal spirit and good taste, reflecting on his rival's origin, and hinting that he was no better Catholic than he should be:--

_He de untarte mis versos con tocino_
_Porque no me los roas, Gongorilla._
(I have to anoint my verses with bacon fat
That you may not gnaw them, Gongorilla.)

The point of which jest, heightened by the contemptuous diminutive, lies in the hint that Góngora, then a priest in orders, was no _old Christian_, but either Jew or Morisco. Another enemy of Quevedo was Perez de Montalvan, a writer of plays the favourite disciple, parasite, and bully of Lope de Vega--whom our satirist was fond of assailing in verse and prose for his dogmatism, his arrogance and his _inscrutable ignorance_. Montalvan took his revenge in a volume entitled _El Tribunal de la Justa Venganza_, written under an assumed name, in which Quevedo's satirical works are tried and condemned for their offences against religion and morality.

Among the works of Quevedo, that which, perhaps, is most characteristic of his genius, and most valuable as a picture of contemporary life and manners, is _Don Pablo de Segovia_, here presented in an English dress, and, as we venture to believe, in a most appropriate and harmonious setting, through the art of M. Vierge. _Don Pablo de Segovia_, otherwise known as _El Gran Tacaño_ (_The Great Sharper_), is a prime sample of that species of romance which was native of the soil of Spain--there first engendered at least, and flourishing nowhere else in the same vigour and luxuriance--the _picaresque_ novel. The _picaro_--from _picar_, to peck, to nibble at--if he was not a special product of Spain, throve there in the sixteenth century as he did nowhere else in the nations. He was not necessarily a rogue, but always a vagabond. He was one who was at odds with the world--a remnant left over in the making of society--a survival of the age gone by. Of his order were all the broken men of the time--a time in which there was much breaking of men--those who lived by their wits on the witless, the mumpers and beggars, strolling quacks, sham pilgrims, charm-sellers, discharged or runaway soldiers, thieves by profession and knaves by necessity, gypsies, bullies and bravoes, jail-birds, roughs, prisoners, and the baser sort of parasites--the excrement of life, the scum and draff of society. In this kind of material, admirable stuff for the humorist and the painter, Spain was especially rich in the sixteenth century. A capital sample of the accomplished _picaro_ is Ginés de Pasamonte, the galley-slave freed by _Don Quixote_, who robbed _Sancho_ of his ass, and afterwards appeared as _Master Peter_, the puppet-showman. He is the typical rogue, whose model in youth, in manhood, and in age is to be found on the canvas of Velasquez and of Murillo. He is a stock figure in the national drama. He must have been a familiar sight to the Spaniards of that age, standing at every street corner, every convent door. He was as common as the poor poet in the market-place. The favourite haunts of the _picaresque_ gentry, the Bohemian and the Alsatian, are they not enumerated by the roguish inn-keeper in _Don Quixote_, himself one of the craft, who plays so deftly upon the knight and his humour?--_the Fish-Market of Malaga, the Islets of Riarán, the Compass of Seville, the Aqueduct-Square of Segovia, the Olive Grove of Valencia, the Suburbs of Granada, the Strand of San Lucar, the Clot-Fountain of Cordova, the Pot-Houses of Toledo._[2]

The causes of this rank growth of the _picaresque_ element in Spain are to be sought in the national history. The long series of exhausting wars in the Netherlands and in Italy; the discovery and development of America; the monstrous multiplication of monks, priests, and religious houses during the reigns of Philip and of his successor--these three, the chief causes of Spain's decadence, may be taken to account for the poverty, and the vice, and the bitterness of the struggle for existence, of which the _picaresque_ order, in its extraordinary luxuriance, was the outgrowth. The cutpurses, the beggars, the professional rogues and sharpers, were but the product of the unwholesome working of the organs of life--the remainder ruffianry of that period of diseased energy. The internal corruption, of which they were the signs, was the consequence of the fever which shook the frame and the fury which stirred the blood of Spain during all that period of seeming grandeur but of real disease. The _picaro_ was the adventurer who had missed his chance in the general scramble, who did not or could not go to Flanders or to America, or who, having been, had returned empty. He was the _conquistador_ out of date--the gold-seeker run to seed. How near he was to the failures of the Church--the vagabond friar, the religious mendicant--is clearly seen from this story of _Paul the Sharper_, as well as from the other tales of the class. The peace of 1609, which secured the independence of Holland and put an end to the long war in the Low Countries, only aggravated the evil condition of Spain, by filling the country with a swarm of needy adventurers and disabled and discharged soldiers, for whom the State made no provision. How fruitful a source of demoralization and misery they were we may learn from all the literature of the period, from _Don Quixote_ downwards. As for America, the reaction of the tide which brought wealth and new life to Spain had set in even before the middle of the sixteenth century. The flood which carried all the men of enterprise and independent spirit to Peru or to Mexico had left Spain drained of her best life-blood. The sudden influx of gold tended to sharpen the distinction between rich and poor--to make it more difficult for the poor to live, while spoiling them for honesty. The old Castilian simplicity of life was destroyed, and the antique honour, the legacy left by the heroic age which closed with the fall of Granada, corrupted. The new rich introduced luxuries and vices which till then had been alien to the Spanish character. The fortunate adventurers who came back from the New World were as great a terror to public morals through their extravagance and their recklessness, as the unsuccessful through their destitution and despair. The national inclination to the sins of pride, idleness, and boastfulness--how could it happen but that it should be enormously fostered and heightened by the easy conquests in America, following upon the shrinking of the martial power and the prodigious swelling of the ecclesiastical? With nearly ten thousand monasteries and nunneries, and more than thirty thousand monks, of the two orders, Franciscan and Dominican, alone--is it a wonder that the Spain of Philip III. should be hastening to decay? The _picaro_ was the fungus which grew out of this mass of corruption. To these running sores was added the expulsion of the Moriscoes under Philip III.--an act of cruelty equally base, barbarous, and stupid, of which the direct consequences were an increase in the cost of life, the stagnation of trade, and the decline of industry, commerce, and agriculture. The blow which reduced the forces of national industry by nearly a million of honest, hardy, thrifty, and skilful workmen, could not but lead to a great increase of poverty, of vice, and of disorder. On this waste, and out of this rottenness, fattened and throve exceedingly the rank weed _picaro_.

The _gusto picaresco_, of which _Don Pablo de Segovia_ is the purest expression, arose in Spain upon the decay of the so-called romance of chivalry. Indeed, the first book in that kind, _Lazarillo de Tormes_, was published when the chivalric romance was in full blast, fifty years before _Don Quixote_ was written; nor is there any evidence to show that the author was actuated by a spite against the prevailing fashion. On the contrary, if the author was, as I presume he was, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, we know that he was a fond admirer of _Amadis_, taking only that book with him and _Celestina_--that curious tragi-comedy, which was, in some sense, a forerunner of the _picaresque_ novel--when despatched to the Eternal City as ambassador of Charles V. There was a close connection between the romantical books of the later period and the earliest of the _picaresque_ stories. The _picaro_, in fact, is the direct descendant and the legitimate child of the debased knight-errant. The public were beginning to get weary of the endless histories of the knights-adventurers--all equally puissant and valorous--and longed for common food. It was not the adventurers, however, of which people were sick, but of the dull and stupid books which pretended to tell of their exploits. Whatever chivalry there was in Spain had died out before the blighting influence of the Second Philip--that antithesis incarnate of all romance. The taste for low life was a natural and to a great extent a healthy reaction from the unwholesome diet, miscalled romance and of chivalry, on which the people had fed. The successor of the knight-errant, the _picaro_, was a good deal like the last of the line preceding, with much the same features. He was more picturesque than the knight-errant, and no greater rogue. _Little Lazarus_ and his kin, _Paul the Sharper_, _Justina_, _Rinconete_, and _Cortadillo_, spoke at least the language of the people. It was a return to nature--the triumph of the real over the romantic--a veritable revolution, which doubtless led the way to a healthier taste and a higher art.

The revolt against the old style was headed by the book which still stands at the head of _picaresque_ literature, _Lazarillo de Tormes_--the work, according to the best tradition and authority, of the famous Castilian statesman, diplomatist, and writer, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. I write this with full cognizance of the attempt recently made by M. Morel-Fatio, in the _Revue de Deux Mondes_, to deprive Mendoza of that honour. It is contended by M. Morel-Fatio that there is no direct evidence of Mendoza's being the author of _Lazarillo_; that he never claimed it as his writing; that it was only attributed to him fifty years after his death; and that an equal if not superior claim is that of Father Juan de Ortega, general of the order of Hieronymite monks, to whom the book is ascribed by a monk of his fraternity, in a work published in 1605. The arguments by which M. Morel-Fatio maintains his theory seem to me to be wholly insufficient against Mendoza's claim, and extravagantly wild and weak in favour of Ortega's. It is true that Mendoza never declared himself to be the author of _Lazarillo de Tormes_. There was ample reason why he should not. The book was first published in 1554; and immediately on its appearance was suppressed by order of the Inquisition, and put in the _Index Expurgatorius_. But in 1554 Mendoza was at the very climax of his public reputation, having just returned from Italy with great credit as Charles V.'s ambassador to the Pope. It was scarcely a time which he would choose to put his name to a book which had been declared offensive to faith and morals, in which the abuses of the Church were boldly attacked, and even its ceremonies ridiculed. The next year Philip II. came to the throne, when Mendoza found himself in disgrace, and had to retire to his estates. It was a period still less favourable for his appearing as the author of a loose and ribald book called _Lazarillo de Tormes_.

Again, it is contended that Mendoza, a grave and haughty noble, of the proudest family in Spain, who aspired to high place and power at Court, could hardly have written such a story, dealing with low life and vulgar people. But Mendoza was a man of varied accomplishments, of wide knowledge of life, unencumbered with the prejudices of caste and of singular literary gifts, who might have been one of the great authors of Spain had he not been content to be a great statesman. He had been trained for the Church, had been a student at Salamanca, and had served in the Spanish armies in Italy. He was thus thoroughly well equipped with all that was required to qualify him for loose literature. Moreover, as one who had been intended for the priesthood--a calling which he abandoned for soldiership--he could be no friend to the cloth, and was precisely the man to ridicule, as he has done, the abuses of the Church and the vices of the priests, even to caricature the _bulero_ and the hawker of indulgences. Lastly, there is this further circumstance in support of his claim that he was known to be a lover of popular literature, and had shown precisely the same literary talent, humour, and idiomatic grace which are characteristic of _Lazarillo_, in some acknowledged letters, still extant, in which he satirizes, with ample knowledge of their tricks and way of life, the _catariberas_--the needy adventurers and greedy office-seekers of the period. As to Ortega, whose claim, first put forth only as a piece of rumour--and, in such a case, of scandal--in 1605, and never since by any Spanish authority repeated--is it necessary to dwell on the absurdity of an ecclesiastic of his eminence writing a book against the vices of his own caste and assailing his own order--a book dealing with the lives of rogues and vagabonds--which had to be suppressed by the Church as soon as it appeared? Nor has M. Morel-Fatio been able to produce any scrap of Ortega's writing, of character and style like _Lazarillo_. Priests and monks have, indeed, in that age and in every other, produced much loose literature. It was a priest who wrote _La Picara Justina_, the dirtiest of its class. It was a Dominican monk who is charged with the authorship of the false Second Part of _Don Quixote_. Without occupying any more of my space on this subject, it is enough to repeat that the weight of testimony since the days of Nicolas Antonio, the learned and accurate author of the _Bibliotheca Hispana Nova_, to the present time, is in favour of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza as the author of _Lazarillo de Tormes_.

Of the _picaresque_ stories, _Lazarillo de Tormes_, though imperfect and without a proper conclusion, must still be regarded as the first in merit as it was the first in time. It has been the model for all its numerous successors, just as the _Amadis of Gaul_ of the previous fashion had been the model for the romances of chivalry. For gaiety of humour, the easy and natural tone of life and simplicity of colouring, it has been held in great favour ever since its appearance; by no one relished more than by the author of _Don Quixote_. The next in date was _Guzman de Alfarache_, by Mateo Aleman, a native of Seville, of which the first part was published in 1599. This, though almost as popular as its predecessor, and even more frequently reprinted and translated, has been much over-praised. It is, in truth, a somewhat arid and tedious performance, written in a poor style. The hero is less interesting than his class, for he is not only a rogue but a hypocrite, who pretends to deceive himself as much as he deceives others, and aspires to be good and pious, which makes him less picturesque and more immoral than if he were a _picaro_ proper and true. Next to follow in that line was the _Picara Justina_, published in 1605, the work of a Dominican whose real name was Andrés Perez. For the better prevention of scandal, Father Perez, being likewise the author of divers devotional books, assumed the name of Lopez de Ubeda. Justina has nothing to recommend her, not even her viciousness. She is false, affected, and silly, and worthy to end, as she does, by becoming the wife of Guzman de Alfarache. The book is perhaps the worst of its class, in art as in ethics, being made additionally nauseous by the moral warnings and tags of virtuous sentiment with which the chapters conclude. Perhaps anterior to both _Guzman de Alfarache_ and _Picara Justina_, though not published till 1613, were Cervantes' two sketches of _picaresque_ life, _Rinconete y Cortadillo_ and _Los Perros de Mahudes_, the scene of which is laid in the Triana, the suburb of Seville, then, as now, the favourite home and head-quarters of the _picaresque_ gentry. There is internal evidence to show that both these stories, which are clearly drawn from real life and actual experience, were written before the death of Philip II., in 1598. Cervantes resided at Seville with his family between 1588 and 1598, and there is little doubt that the picture he draws of Seville low life is of this period. _Rinconete y Cortadillo_, in all the qualities of the higher art, must be placed at the head of this species of literature. Although only a sketch, it is brimful of humour, wit, and life, drawn with the same delicate and masterly hand which has given us _Don Quixote_. What is admirable in the picture is the skill with which a repulsive subject is treated, so that, while preserving all its truth, it is redeemed from grossness. There is not a word which is offensive to taste; yet the thieves, the bullies, the _bona robas_, and the other delightful but most improper people, move and breathe and talk as _full of life as if they lived indeed_. In others of his books, Cervantes has shown his wide and profound knowledge--doubtless born of actual experience--of this lower order of humanity, as in his _Rufian Dichoso_, the _Fortunate Bully_, and in some of his plays and interludes.

It is needless to follow in detail the history of the later experiments in the _gusto picaresco_. As we approach later times the stories become duller and more respectable. The _Marcos de Obregon_ of Vicente Espinel appeared in 1618. It is a story of adventure abroad rather than of low life at home, not wanting in spirit, and with a more regular construction than most stories of this class, from which Le Sage has stolen very largely and boldly in his _Gil Blas_, even appropriating the name of the hero, and giving it to one of his characters. In 1624 came another of the _picaresque_ brood, called _Alonso, Mozo de Muchos Amos_ (_Alonso, Servant of Many Masters_), by one Yanez y Rivera, which deals with the humours of domestic service. We need not occupy ourselves with the long string of lesser works of this character, which are rather romances of real life than _picaresque_ tales--the _Niña de los Embustes_ (the _Child of Tricks_) and the _Garduña de Sevilla_ (the _She-Marten of Seville_) of Solorzano; the _Diablo Cojuelo_ (the _Lame Devil_) of Guevara, and _Estevanillo Gonzalez_, attributed to the same author, which is the pretended autobiography of a buffoon, better known by Le Sage's French version than in the original. Last of all, we come to that which by some is reckoned to be the _picaresque_ novel _par excellence_--the well-known work of Le Sage himself, in collaboration with many others, called _Gil Blas_. This, with all its merits, is no _picaresque_ novel at all, except in an oblique sense as being the work of a _picaroon_--a clever theft by an adept in literary conveyance, the very Autolycus of authors. While the matter is Spanish, the form and, oddly enough, a great deal of the spirit, is French. I will not go into the question of what were the sources from which Le Sage drew his story. That very Spanish and yet curiously French work (_Spanish bricks in French mortar_) is a wonderful piece of literary craft, showing a genius in the art of stealing which is equal to that of original composition, and even more rare. But _Gil Blas_, when all is said, is not a true _picaroon_, of the breed of _Lazarillo_ and _Rinconete_. He is an impostor, but in another than the true sense. He is a fortune-hunter, who looks closely to the main chance, who descends to be respectable, who aims at a social position, like _Jerome Paturot_. He marries twice, and lives comfortably in a fine house--a prosperous gentleman, after bidding hope and fortune farewell. He is no more a _picaro_ than _Ruy Blas_ is a Spaniard or Djalma an Indian prince.

Of the _picaresque_ novel, which is the special product of Spain--never successfully acclimatized in any other country, and as entirely Spanish as the _olla_ or the _gazpacho_--one of the purest specimens is _Don Pablo de Segovia (Paul the Sharper), exemplo de Vagamundos y espejo de Tacaños--pattern of Vagabonds and mirror of rogues_. The book is generally known as _El Buscon_, or _El Gran Tacaño_. The latter title, which is not Quevedo's, was made the leading designation of the book after the author's death, and is still that by which the book is most popular in Spain. _Buscon_ is from _buscar_, to seek, and means a pursuer of fortune, a searcher after the means of life, a _cadger_. _Tacaño_ is ingeniously derived by old Covarrubias, in the earliest Spanish dictionary, from the Greek [Greek: kakós], being a corruption of _cacaño_; or from the Hebrew _tachach_, which is said to mean fraud and deceit. _Don Pablo_, however his titles may be derived, is generally admitted to be the perfect type of an adventurer of the _picaresque_ school. The book of his exploits, though left, like so many Spanish books, unfinished, is described by Quevedo's best critic as _of all his writings the freest from affectation, the richest in lively and natural humours, the brightest, simplest, and most perspicuous; in which he comes nearest to the amenity, artlessness, and delightful and delicate style of Don Quixote_. These praises are not undeserved, although the knight of industry, in his quest of adventures, is very far from being of kin to the warrior of chivalry, the gentle and perfect knight of La Mancha. Disfigured as it is by all Quevedo's faults of style and manner, _Don Pablo_ deserves to be rescued from the fate to which its faults of language, rather than its defects of taste or its failure in the moral part, have hitherto consigned it, at least in England. As a picture of low, vagabond life, it necessarily deals with vice, but it cannot be said that the vice is rendered attractive. All the characters are bad, in the sense that they all belong to the class who have failed to achieve a decent life. The company is not select in which we move, but it can hardly be said that there is contamination in it any more than we get from looking at Hogarth's _Gin Lane_, or the _Borrachos_ of Velasquez. From beginning to end _Don Pablo's_ career is one of undisguised trickery, dissimulation, and lying. All his companions are thieves, or impostors, or rogues, patent or undetected. The scenes are laid almost entirely in the lowest places--in the slums of Segovia, of Madrid, and of Seville, mostly in prison or in some refuge from the law. The manners of the people, men and women, are as repulsive as their morals; and they talk (which is not unusual) after their natures. When we concede all this we admit the worst which can be said of Quevedo's work, and impute nothing against the author, either as artist or moralist. It is difficult to imagine any virtue of a texture so frail as to be injured by the reading of _Paul the Sharper_. There is no vice in the book, even though it deals exclusively with vicious people. There is nothing hurtful in the character of the complete rogue, nor is he painted in any but his natural colours, as a mean, sordid vagabond, who does or says nothing whatever to gild his trade or to embellish his calling. This is the crowning merit of Quevedo's book, among those of its class, that there are no shabby tricks played upon the reader, such as other writers of even higher pretensions are guilty of--no attempt to pass off a rogue as though he were a hero in distress--a creature deserving of sympathy, who is only treating the world as the world treated him--a victim of fortune, whose ill-usage by society justifies his attitude towards the social system. There is no sentiment expended over _Paul of Segovia_. There is no snivelling over his low condition, or railing at his unhappy lot. He is not conscious of his degradation. He is a thief, the son of a thief, with a perfect knowledge of what his mother is; but he makes no secret of his calling, nor indulges in excuses for himself or his family. The other heroes of the _picaresque_ novel make some faint pretence to decent behaviour, but _Paul_ never deviates into respectability. He is _picaro_ to the fingers' ends--in either sense. Through all his changes of character and of costume he is still rogue, entire and perfect, without any sprouts of honesty or repinings after a better life. The _naïveté_ with which he tells of his exploits, without boasting and without shame, is of the highest art--true to nature, nor offensive to morality. Whether he is cheating a jailer or bilking a landlady, dodging the _alguacil_ or bamboozling the old poet, or befooling the nun, or tricking the bully, he is always true to himself, without affectation or conceit of being other than he is. There are no asides, where either the hero or the author (as the bad modern custom is) communes with his conscience, or finds excuses for himself, or draws a moral, or in some way or other imparts to the reader how much superior he (the writer) is to his hero, and how conscious he is of the reader's presence, giving him to understand, in a manner unflattering to his intelligence, how that all that he writes is in joke and not to be taken in bad part. That Quevedo does not do so is his chief point of art in the book, which deserves to be ranked among the best of its class, as a chapter out of the great comedy of human life. The simplicity with which the story is told, without those digressions and interruptions to which the Spanish story-teller is so prone, make it a work almost unique among books of the kind. For once Quevedo has spoken in a language direct and plain, without a riddle or a hidden motive. It is of course a satire, but a satire of the legitimate kind, not upon persons, but upon mankind--against general vice, not against particular sins. The characters of the story, which seems rather to tell itself than to be told, are all such as were the common property of the comic writers of the period, but scarcely anywhere else are they found invested with so much of the breath of life. _Don Pablo_ himself, his companions, his fellow-students, the crazy old poet, the villainous jailer, the braggart _espadachins_, the poor _hidalgo_, the strolling players, the beggars, the gay ladies, the jail-birds, bullies, and thieves--every member of that unclean company, with all their unsavoury surroundings, is a real, living personage.

_Don Pablo de Segovia_ was first published in 1626, at Saragossa, and had a great success, several editions being called for before the author's death. There is reason to believe that it was written some years before, being probably circulated in manuscript among the author's friends before being printed, as was the custom of the time. In 1624 Quevedo had been lately released from the first of his imprisonments at Torre de San Juan Abad, and had partially recovered the favour of the Court. It was a period when the printers were most busy with his works--when satires, political apologues, religious tracts, visions, burlesque and piquant odes, fantasies, and calls to devotion were being poured forth abundantly out of his fruitful brain. Señor Guerra y Orbe believes that _Don Pablo_ was written in 1608. That it was composed before 1624 is proved, I think, by the character of the book, which is certainly more juvenile than belongs to a man of forty-six, as well as by a piece of evidence to be found within. In chapter viii., when on the road to Torrejon, _Don Pablo_ comes up with a crazy man mounted on a mule, who proves to be a master of the art of fencing, with several extravagant projects in his brain for the good of the kingdom. Among these he has two schemes to propose to the king for the reduction of Ostend. Now the great siege of Ostend, which is doubtless the one referred to, was that which ended, after three years' fighting in which an extraordinary number were slain on both sides, in September, 1604. It is a reasonable conjecture, therefore, that _Don Pablo_, at least as far as chapter viii., was written prior to this date. The chapters in which the students' adventures at Alcalá are described seem to me also to bear internal evidence of having been written when the impression of university life was still fresh upon the author. This theory of the date of _Don Pablo_ makes the author a young man of twenty-three when the book was composed; and the book itself the third, in order of time, of the _picaresque_ romances, following closely after _Guzman de Alfarache_.

_Don Pablo de Segovia_ has been always popular in its native country, and has been frequently translated into other languages. Señor Guerra y Orbe notes more than forty editions of the original in Spain and in the Spanish dominions. An Italian translation, by Juan Pedro Franco, appeared in 1634 at Venice. A French version, by Geneste, was included among the burlesque works of Quevedo, translated into that language in 1641. Other early French versions are those of Lyons and of Brussels. In 1842 M. Germond de Lavigne brought out his translation of _Don Pablo_ which is spirited and readable, but a good deal changed from the original. Portions of other works by Quevedo are inserted in the text, a prologue borrowed from the _Hora de Todos_, and a conclusion added from out of the manufactory of M. Lavigne himself. In M. Lavigne's latest edition of 1882 appeared the first of M. Vierge's admirably spirited and characteristic sketches.

_Don Pablo_ was early introduced into the English tongue, though it is perhaps the least known of Quevedo's works. The _Visions_, translated by the indefatigable Sir Roger L'Estrange, first appeared in 1688, and went through many editions in that and the succeeding century. The English version has the merit, which belongs to all L'Estrange's work, of being in good, sound, and vigorous language, lively and not inelegant, but it is far from faithful to the original, the translator taking great liberties with his author in the attempt to bring him up to the level of the _humour of the times_. The _Visions_ were much read and often quoted by English writers of the last century. The _Buscon_, shorn of much of his stature, was Englished by _a person of quality_ so early as 1657, with a dedication to a lady. It was still further reduced in 1683, both in size and art, though most of the grossness was left untouched. The well-known Captain John Stevens, who translated Mariana's _History_ and professed (without warrant) to improve and correct Shelton's _Don Quixote_ (which he did not do to any appreciable extent), also took Quevedo in hand, translating _Don Pablo_, among other _comical pieces_, in 1707. A new translation was given to the world in 1734 by Don Pedro Pineda, a teacher of the Spanish language, then resident in London. Pineda it was who revised the Spanish text of the splendid edition of _Don Quixote_, published at the charge of Lord Carteret in 1734, four handsome quarto volumes--the first in which print and paper did full justice to Cervantes' masterpiece. Though a person of little humour, who fell a victim to Cervantes' irony in the matter of the poet Lofraso and his _Fortuna de Amor_, Pineda was a competent Spanish scholar, at least for that age. How far his English was his own we have no means of knowing, but his _perfect knowledge of the language of the original_ recommended him to the editors of the edition of _Quevedo's Works_, published at Edinburgh in 1798, as a person fit to revise and correct the version of Mr. Stevens. That version, though not satisfactory in all respects, is still the best we have in English. It is almost too faithful to the original in respect that it retains many expressions, phrases, and words, of the kind in which Quevedo loved to indulge, which, however appropriate in the mouths of the speakers in a thieves' den or a convict prison, are scarcely delicate enough for the taste of the modern English public, or necessary to bring out the full humour of the story.

The text of the English translation of 1798, corrected and revised, is that which has been followed in the present publication, of which the immediate object is less to rescue Quevedo's story from oblivion than to bring to the notice of the public the singular merit of his countryman, M. Vierge (Daniel Urrabieta), as an artist in black and white.

H. E. WATTS.

THE HISTORY OF THE
LIFE OF THE SHARPER
CALLED DON PABLO
THE PATTERN OF
VAGABONDS AND
MIRROR OF ROGUES.