Pablo de Segovia, the Spanish Sharper

Quevedo and His Works

With an Essay on the Picaresque Novel

Not more unquestioned is Cervantes’ claim to be the first of Spanish humorists than that of Quevedo to be the second. Among his own countrymen the title, which is generally the more disputable, has been by a singular consensus of opinion assigned to Quevedo. The author of Don Quixote apart, who is with the Immortals, there is no greater name among the writers of Spain than that of the author of The Visions, of Don Pablo, of innumerable poems, pamphlets, satires, pieces of wit, and works serious, moral, sportive, and fanciful. In that Golden Age, prolific of authors, the hundred years between the birth of Cervantes and the prime of Calderón, there was no genius so fruitful in every kind of intellectual product. Poet, politician, humorist, satirist, theologian, moralist, historian, novelist—Quevedo stands out a prodigy of learning, wit, and quick and various invention, even among the crowd of gifted writers who made that period famous in letters. He has been called the Spanish Juvenal—the Spanish Ovid—the Spanish Lucian. He is something of all these, and yet is unlike any of them. He wrote lyrics with the grace, simplicity, and ease of Horace. He is as prodigal of humour as Rabelais, whom he resembles also in his unfastidiousness, his obscurity, and his extravagance. He has been likened to our English Swift, to whom he is akin in the quality of his mordant wit, and almost approaches in his anti-humanity; but he is lacking in the creative force of the author of Gulliver. Not unlike Swift was Quevedo in fortune as in genius, for it was disappointed ambition which wore out his heart and drove him to satire, to visions, and assaults on human folly and vice.

From his earliest years Quevedo was marked for distinction. When scarcely more than twenty-three he corresponded with the great scholars of Germany and the Low Countries, the great Lipsius hailing him as magnum decus Hispanorum, and in complimentary epistles urging him to undertake the vindication of Homer. If we may believe the contemporary records, Quevedo had by this time acquired all profane knowledge and human learning. He was versed in all the languages, even Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic. He began to write early, and continued to write during the whole of his busy and turbulent life, with an industry, energy, and fecundity which made him the wonder of his age. The catalogue of his works embraces every department of authorship, and there appears to be no species of composition, from an exhortation to a holy life to the more than ribald canzonet, which he did not attempt. The gayest themes were as much to his mind as the gravest studies, and from Paul the Apostle he could pass at will to Paul the Sharper, with no apparent effort of wit or strain of conscience. Some of his works have been lost, but enough remains to testify to the astonishing vigour, exuberance, and versatility of his genius. There are religious treatises and biographies of saints, a Defence of the Faith, and a homily on the sacred cradle and sepulchre. There is a metrical translation of Epictetus, and another of (the false) Phocylides. There is a life of Marcus Brutus. There are letters to kings and statesmen, and tracts on the currency. There are satires in verse and lampoons in prose. There are poems, odes, ballads, and sonnets innumerable. Even the drama he did not leave unattempted, though his comedies have perished, together with many other works, including Considerations on the New Testament and a Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul. Finally, there is the picaresque novel here presented to the English reader under the title of Don Pablo de Segovia, or Paul the Sharper.

Francisco de Quevedo, or, to give him his full title, Francisco de Gomez de Quevedo Villegas, was born at Madrid on the 26th of September, 1580. He was thus thirty-three years younger than Cervantes, eighteen years younger than Lope de Vega, and some twenty years older than Calderón. His father had been a servant to the Emperor Charles V, and his mother was a lady in attendance upon Philip II’s fourth wife, Anne of Austria. The family of Quevedo drew its source from the mountains of Old Castile, near Burgos. This was a circumstance of which every good Spaniard of the age was proud, as proving that he was descended from the pure Gothic race, who maintained their hold of the soil even after the Moorish invasion, and therefore was an “old Christian,” of blood unmixed with Moor or Jew. From his parents’ position the young Francisco must have been early trained in the life of the Court and brought into contact with those who dispensed the power and patronage of the king. He was educated at the University of Alcalá de Henares, then in the height of its fame. At fifteen he graduated in theology, and soon afterwards acquired great distinction for his attainments in the civil and common law and in the learned languages. That he was early distinguished as a scholar is proved by his correspondence with Lipsius and other foreign men of learning, by whom he was addressed as an equal. For some time, however, Quevedo seems to have lived the usual life of a gay cavalier of the Court, indulging, as he confesses himself, in the pleasures of his age and the time, and taking part in those adventures which formed matter for his lighter works. At twenty-three he was already a poet distinguished enough to be included in Espinosa’s Flores de Poetas Ilustres (1603). A few years afterwards was published the first collection of his prose satires, which are better known to the world as Visions—the Zahúrdas de Plutón (Pigsties of Pluto), with a dedication to the Conde de Lemos—a Mæcenas of the period, to whom afterwards Cervantes dedicated the second part of his Don Quixote. The pieces which are known as Visions are among the most characteristic and original, as they have been the most popular, of all Quevedo’s works. They bear such titles as “El Sueño de las Calaveras” (The Dream of Skulls); “El Alguacil Alguacilado” (The Catchpole Caught); “Visita de los Chistes” (Visitation of the Jests); “El Mundo por de Dentro” (The World Inside Out); “El Entremetido, la Dueña, y el Soplón” (The Intermeddler, the Duenna, and the Informer); and (the authorship of which is more doubtful) “La Casa de los Locos de Amor” (The House of the Love-Madmen). These, which were published at various times, are satires of a kind then new to the world, or known only in the works of Lucian; audacious and somewhat extravagant of conception; abounding in wit, in fancy, and in humour; various in character and in design, but all intended to ridicule or censure some reigning folly or vice or abuse. They have been called “Visions” because most of them are cast in the form of dreams, in which the author takes us into the world below, among the Devil and his attendants, who are introduced with many lively touches of wit and strokes of humour. It is an invention which has been in favour with poets and satirists of all time, from Lucian to Dante, and from Dante to Lord Byron.

By these Visions (by himself never so called collectively) the name of Quevedo has been chiefly made known out of Spain. They are among the most characteristic of his works, in which his audacious humour and impetuous fancy found full exercise and a congenial element. They have been often translated into the various European languages, and were much read and quoted in the commerce of letters. Besides these, the Visions proper, which are serious satires levelled at the abuses and the evils of the times, there were numerous other squibs, jests, and pasquinades, of less solid substance or of lower aim, in rebuke of the fashionable follies or the vulgar tastes, such as “El Cuento de los Cuentos” (The Tale of Tales), which is levelled at the excessive use of proverbs; “El Caballero de la Tenaza” (The Knight of the Forceps), being the apology of a miser for himself; “La Perinola” (The Teetotum), which is a personal attack on the fussy and frivolous Pérez de Montalván, one of Quevedo’s favourite butts. There are numerous others, of which the very titles are so coarse as not to be fit for mention—ephemeral and obscure, which have died with the occasions which gave them birth.

That at least before 1613 Quevedo was esteemed, by those best capable of judging, as among the best wits of the time, appears from the very flattering notice of him which is contained in Cervantes’ Viage del Parnaso (Voyage to Parnassus). He is there called “Apollo’s son—son of the Muse Calliope”; and his aid is declared to be absolutely necessary in the war which the god of poetry is about to wage with the bad poets. It is true that Cervantes was in the habit of praising almost everybody, but from the warmth of the terms used, and from other indications in Quevedo’s own works, we may infer that the two greatest wits of the period had, as great wits rarely have, a just appreciation of each other. Lope de Vega also, who was of a different order of genius, as well of a nature dissimilar, ever suspicious of a rival and jealous of the applause given to another, could bring himself to speak of Quevedo in his Laurel de Apolo as “prince of the lyric poets,” the Juvenal of Spanish verse, who might rival Pindar and replace Apollo himself if the god were to fail.

But before Quevedo had made his name in letters he was destined to earn distinction in a public career, which afforded him a rare opportunity for displaying the versatility of his talents and the soundness of his judgment. Debarred from the profession of arms by his physical infirmity—he was lame of both feet from his birth—he was driven to seek a career in civil employment. An adventure which befell him at Madrid served to fix his destiny. Being in a church at Madrid during the Holy Week, he saw a gallant of the Court offer a gross insult to a modest woman. He interfered to protect her, swords were drawn, and Quevedo slew the aggressor. The slain man being discovered to be a person of rank, nearly related to those who had power at Court, Quevedo was forced to fly the country, taking refuge in Sicily, then a dependency of Spain. The governor or viceroy of the island was Don Pedro Téllez Girón, Duke of Osuna, a powerful grandee, of whom it was said that “nature made him a very little gentleman and his deeds a very great lord”; a man of mark in the civil and military transactions of Philip III. Quevedo was made his secretary by the Duke, and employed in many delicate and important affairs of state, in all of which he is declared to have proved, on the Duke’s own testimony, his prudence, courage, and ability. The Duke of Osuna was transferred, in 1615, from the government of Sicily to that of Naples, and thither he was followed by Quevedo, who was made Minister of Finance. In the interval between his employment in Sicily and his higher office at Naples, Quevedo was despatched to Madrid on a confidential mission in connection with the revenues of the island, and was able to commend himself so greatly to the authorities that the affair of the fatal duel was condoned and a pension of four hundred ducats bestowed on him. At Naples Quevedo discharged his duties of financial secretary with great ability and conspicuous success, so that we are told that, while he reduced the burdens of the people, he augmented the revenues of the State. During the years following he seems to have been employed in various high and secret diplomatic businesses in connection with the policy of the ambitious and turbulent Duke, his master, being entrusted with the duties of a plenipotentiary at Rome and at Venice, and managing them, according to the contemporary historians, with much address and discretion. In the course of his political adventures Quevedo was involved, in 1617, in that strange affair among conspiracies which has since been so great a puzzle to historians, the so-called Conjuracion de Venise, which has furnished St. Real with a subject for his history, and Otway with characters and a plot for his tragedy. Whether there really was, on the part of the Spanish Viceroy of Naples, an attempt to overthrow the government of the Venetian Republic, or whether, as later historians are inclined to believe, the whole business was planned by the agents of the Venetian Senate to enable them to reach certain of their political enemies, is a question which is still under controversy—a controversy in which we are not concerned to take a part. Certain it is that Quevedo contrived, as an agent of Spain, to make himself a person the most ungrateful to the Republic, which pursued him, for some months afterwards, with a fury of hate and bitterness of malice, which, though flattering to his character of political intriguant, seem irreconcilable with the theory of his innocence. He even ran a narrow risk of losing his life when on a visit, apparently secret and unauthorized, to Venice. He was chased by the officers of justice, and only escaped, we are told, through the completeness of his disguise, being habited in the rags of a beggar, and his perfect command of the Venetian dialect. He had the honour of being afterwards burnt in effigy, a compliment he returned by pouring a stream of invective on Venice and her government out of the resources of his abundant rhetoric. Venice he called “the lumber-house of the world—the tollbooth of princes—a republic such as cannot be credited and cannot be forgotten—greater than it is fitting for her to be, and less than she gives herself out to be; powerful in treaties, and feeble in power; sumptuous in arsenals, profuse in ships; terrible to those who fear the hulks of a fleet, where fleet is none—a dominion which exposes the hollowness of many fears. It is a state the more prone to dissensions of all that exist, more hurtful to her friends than to her enemies, whose embrace is a peaceful war”—with a good deal else, in a tone which savours of very bitter recollections.

Quevedo had now arrived at the zenith of his fame and fortunes. In 1617 he was in Madrid, where he was received with great honour by the King, Philip III, and his minister, the all-powerful Duke of Lerma. He was advanced to the much-coveted distinction of a Knight of the Order of Santiago. The highest posts seemed to be awaiting him at home, through favour of the feeble and besotted King, then under the influence of a corrupt and incapable favourite, who was himself ruled by his minion, Don Rodrigo Calderón. The ambition of Quevedo, as all his serious works clearly show, was rather for power as a man of affairs than for fame as a man of letters. But now he was destined to encounter a sudden change of fortune. The death of Philip III brought to the throne, in 1621, his son, Philip IV, then a lad of seventeen, under the dominion of his gentleman of the bedchamber, known to history as the Count-Duke Olivares. All the principal officers of the late administration were dismissed in disgrace. Even the powerful and able Duke of Osuna, whose brilliant and successful rule in Naples had shed so much lustre on the reign of the feeble Philip III, was recalled from his post. His ministers and secretaries were involved in his fate. Quevedo was sentenced to exile from Court, and confined to his patrimonial village of La Torre de Juan Abad, where he was kept in a kind of imprisonment for more than three years. To a man of his fervid temperament and aspiring hopes this was a punishment worse than death, which seems forever after to have embittered his soul and soured his temper. Writing to the President of Castile to complain of his miserable state and the treatment to which he was subjected, he tells him that “he had seen many men condemned to death, but no one condemned to make away with himself.” He was ultimately allowed to go free without being told of what charge there had been against him or any reason given for his detention. Henceforth Quevedo seems to have abandoned all hopes of preferment at Court, exhibiting more philosophy and more steadfastness in his resolve to abstain from further thoughts of political life than other men of letters have shown, in a similar turn of fate, who have been endowed with the same taste for the delights of office. He seems to have recovered some portion of the royal favour. He was offered various high posts in the State, among others the embassy to Genoa, but he refused them, and would only accept the honorary title of King’s Secretary. He did not wholly exclude himself from politics, however, but, like Swift, continued to vex himself with public affairs, showing by his sensibility to the follies and errors of statesmen where his heart lay, and what was the secret of the saeva indignatio by which he was tortured. He was free with his pen in condemnation of crying abuses and defects in the administration. He was prolific of letters, pamphlets, and satires in prose and verse, all written with a boldness and freedom to which the age was unaccustomed, which brought their author frequently into trouble. He assailed a scheme for the debasement of the coinage with a courage and a power of wit and sarcasm such as were not excelled even by the famous Drapier, on the same theme, a hundred years later. He exposed certain abuses in the distribution of the patronage of the military order of Santiago with a fearlessness which cost him another period of banishment from Court. He wrote letters to the King of France (Louis XIII) and others, more or less directly impugning the conduct of affairs then under the worthless favourite, the Count-Duke of Olivares.

In 1634 Quevedo, being in his fifty-fourth year, married—to the surprise, and somewhat to the amusement, of his friends. His way of life hitherto had scarcely been such as to proclaim his confidence in the married state; and a letter which he had written to his friend, the widowed Duchess of Lerma, on the qualities required of a wife, had seemed to set his standard of taste so high as to condemn him to celibacy. His wife died soon after their marriage, leaving Quevedo with fresh troubles, arising out of his satirical humour, or rather from his reputation for satire. He had betaken himself, after his wife’s death, to his country retreat at Torre de Juan Abad to seek consolation in literature; and this was probably his busiest period of production. He wrote a life of Marcus Brutus, of which the scarcely concealed intention was to point to the Caesar who then tyrannized over Spain. He aimed satires in verse, after the classical model, at the reigning favourite. He wrote the Politica de Dios y Gobierno de Cristo (Policy of God and Government of Christ), which, under the guise of a religious work, was a biting satire on the King and the Count-Duke. He wrote other works, some of which have perished, distinguished by elegance of style and energy of expression, none of them deserving of more than a passing mention, and all belonging rather to the political history than to the literature of Spain. To this period also, probably, are to be referred the greater part of those satirical works, under the name of Visions, which have chiefly contributed to make the name of Quevedo known to the nations outside of Spain—those bitter, half-humorous, half-serious, and all-fantastical inventions, such as “The Dream of Skulls” and “The World Inside Out.”

In 1639, when it might have seemed to him that Fortune had already done her worst to plague him, and he had no more either to hope or fear from kings or ministers, there happened to Quevedo the worst of all the calamities which marked his busy and troubled life. A satirical sonnet was found under the King’s napkin at supper, which contained violent reflections on the Government of the Count-Duke Olivares. Quevedo was believed to be the author, and, without any inquiry or trial, he was seized at dead of night, in the Duke of Medina Celi’s palace, and hurried off to a dungeon under the cells of the Royal Convent of San Marcos at Leon. Here he was kept in strict confinement for nearly four years, in spite of a pitiful appeal to Olivares, in which, while protesting his innocence of the offence imputed to him, Quevedo wrote: “No clemency can add many years to my life; no rigour can take many away.” He was asked to declare which of the many satires there were going about were his and which were not, but he returned a proud and disdainful answer. The real author of the lampoon for which Quevedo was punished was discovered soon after, but this made little or no difference in the treatment to which he was subjected. In vain did he entreat the Count-Duke for justice and relief. He pleaded that he was blind of the left eye, crippled, and afflicted with ulcers, declaring that he sought not liberty but change of regimen and of prison, “and this change, the gospel says, Christ granted to a great number of devils who besought it of Him.” In vain were all these pleas. They were probably glad to be able to silence, on any pretext, that bold and biting tongue, which had already done so much to proclaim to posterity the iniquities of the Government. It was not until after the fall of the Count-Duke himself, amidst the rejoicings of the whole nation, that Quevedo was restored to liberty. But his four years’ imprisonment, during part of which time he had been treated, as he complains, “like a wild beast” shut up alone without human intercourse, had ruined his health and broken his spirits. His estate had been sequestrated, and he was never able to recover more than a small part of it, so that poverty was added, for the first time in his life, to his other trials. Worn out by his infirmities, he died at last, of an imposthume in the chest, contracted during his imprisonment in a damp cell of the Convent, on the 8th of September, 1645, having previously made his peace with God and the Church in the usual manner.

More fortunate than his master and great contemporary, Cervantes, Quevedo survives in canvas and in marble, so that we are able to realize the external features of the man. His portrait by Velasquez, representing him with a huge pair of spectacles on his nose and the cross of Santiago on his left bosom, is that by which he is best known. There is also a bust of him in the Public Library at Madrid. The first of his biographers, the Neapolitan Tarsia, has drawn this picture of him, evidently from recollection, in words: “Quevedo was of middling stature; his hair black and somewhat frizzled” (encrespado), “his eyes very brilliant, but so short of sight that he constantly wore spectacles; the nose and other features well proportioned; and of a medium frame well made above, although lame and crippled in both feet, which were twisted inwards; somewhat bulky without being misshapen; very fair of countenance, and in the main with all those marks coexistent in his person which physiognomists commend as indicating a good temperament and a virtuous disposition.” His biography by Tarsia, published in 1663, is a dull and tedious piece of work. By far the best account of Quevedo is that which I have made the basis of this sketch, the biography attached to the only complete collection of Quevedo’s works, by Don Aureliano Fernandez Guerra y Orbe, which forms three volumes in Rivadeneyra’s Biblioteca de los Autores Españoles. The Essai sur la Vie et les Œuvres de Quevedo, by Ernest Merimée (Paris, 1886), is a careful and painstaking work, of which the materials have been taken from Guerra y Orbe.

To judge the character of the man is easier for posterity than to estimate the worth of his products in literature. The greater part of his writings, those which brought him most fame in his lifetime, men have ceased to read even in Spain itself. Of the eleven octavo volumes which constituted the first complete edition of Quevedo’s works (1791–94) it may be said that it would be no loss to the world had three-fourths shared the doom which their author, on his deathbed, requested might overtake them all. The orthodox would thus have been saved much scandal, the expurgators a great deal of trouble, the critics and the commentators an endless amount of curious inquiry. The theology and the politics (these in Quevedo are much confused) have already perished. The satires have been visited by the destiny which invariably attends the works of wit which are dedicated to passing uses, when literature stoops to the service of politics.

But while the graver works of Quevedo, those which won him the applause of the learned and the favour of the great, have perished or are sunk into oblivion, there have survived enough of those lighter pieces born of his humour or his fancy, which he could scarcely be got to own in his lifetime, to keep his name alive and to secure for him a permanent place in literature. His lyrics are among the best in the language, and still keep their place in every collection of classic Castilian poetry. Those written in his early days, which include odes, sonnets, ballads, quintillas, and redondillas, mostly cast in a light and graceful mould, are distinguished for elegance of language, delicacy of fancy, and simple, tender expression. His burlesque poems (which include some pieces of a breadth such as excludes them from polite society), written in the picaresque dialect, of which, like Cervantes, he was a past master—the Jácaras, in which the people, the gitanos, the jaques, and the buzos, speak the language of Germania—the langue verte of Spain—are said still to be heard in the country, sung to the strumming of guitars. His regular verse is chiefly satire in the manner of Juvenal, against the corruption of morals and the evils of misgovernment. Of his prose writings the best are those which are purely sportive and fanciful, without serious intention, as the “Visita de los Chistes,” where he makes pleasant fun of the personages which figure in the old proverbs and popular sayings, as Mateo Pico, who is enshrined in the phrase, No dijerá mas Mateo Pico; Agrages, the boaster from Amadis of Gaul, who is forever quoted as saying, “Agora lo verédes” (see Don Quixote, passim); Pero Grullo, the prophet who prophesied only of what he knew had come to pass; Calainos, of the ballad Cabalgaba Calainos; Don Diego de Noche; Marta, who is forever expressing her satisfaction that though she died, she died with a bellyful; and Villadiego, whose breeches have immortalized his name; with Juan Ramos, and the rest. The fun which Quevedo makes out of this flimsy material is only to be understood by those who know the proverbs of Spain, and the great part they play in the national talk and literature.

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, etc. 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 Pérez 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, jailbirds, 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 marketplace. The favourite haunts of the picaresque gentry, the Bohemian and the Alsatian, are they not enumerated by the roguish innkeeper 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 Córdova, the Pothouses 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 lifeblood. 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 tragicomedy, 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 Alemán, 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 overpraised. 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 Pérez. For the better prevention of scandal, Father Pérez, being likewise the author of divers devotional books, assumed the name of López 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 headquarters 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 Buscón, 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. Buscón 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 κακός, 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 naivete 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 storyteller 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 jailbirds, 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 Torrejón, 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 Buscón, 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.