life of those dearest, was as dust in the balance compared with the satisfying to the utmost tittle the demands of these; so that one might say, that what Sir Philip Sidney has so beautifully called "the hate-spot ermeline," the ermine that rather dies than sullies its whiteness with one spot or stain, was the model they had chosen. Here was a society which had fashioned to itself a code of ethics, which, with all of lofty and generous that was in it, was yet often exaggerated, perverted, fantastic, inexorable, bloody; but which claimed unquestioning submission from all, and about obeying which, no hesitation of a moment might occur. What materials for the dramatic poet were here!

Nor may we leave out of sight that there were circumstances, which modified and rendered less fatal than we might have expected they would prove, even those influences that were manifestly hostile to the free development of genius in Spain. Thus it is quite true that Spain may be said finally to have passed from a land of constitutional freedom into a despotism, with the crushing by Philip the Second of the liberties of Aragon. But for all this, the mighty impulses of the free period which went before, did not immediately fail. It is not for a generation or two

that despotism effectually accomplishes its work, and shows its power in cramping, dwarfing, and ultimately crushing the faculties of a people. The nation lives for a while on what has been gained in nobler epochs of its life; and it is not till this is exhausted, till the generation which was reared in a better time has passed away, and also the generation which they have formed and moulded under the not yet extinct traditions of freedom, that all the extent of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual mischief becomes apparent. Moreover, it must not be lost sight of that the Spanish was not an antinational despotism, such as the English would have been, if Charles the First had succeeded in his attempt to govern without Parliaments. On the contrary it was a despotism in which the nation gloried; which itself helped forward. It was consequently one in which the nation did not feel that humiliation and depression, which are the results of one running directly counter to the national feeling, and being the permanent badge of unsuccessful resistance to a detested yoke.

Even the hateful Inquisition itself, by discouraging, and indeed absolutely repressing, all activity of genius in every other directiondestined as it was absolutely to extinguish it in

all-yet for a season gave greater impulse to its movements in one direction. There was one province, that of poetry, and above all dramatic poetry, over which it never seems to have extended that jealous and suspicious surveillance with which it watched every other region of human thought and activity.

Such are some features of the Spain in which Lope de Vega, Calderon, and their peers grew up; under these influences they were formed. At the time, indeed, when Calderon was born, and much more when he was rising into manhood, the glory of his country was somewhat on its decline. Grey hairs were upon her. She, however, knew it not. Many glimpses of her past glory gilded her yet. Many pledges and evidences of her former greatness, not a few bequests of that heroic past, remained with her still. The Netherlands were not yet hopelessly lost; Portugal was still an appanage of the Spanish crown; the youthful Condé had not yet destroyed at Rocroi the prestige of that hitherto invincible infantry of Spain. She might still believe herself rich, because the treasures of the Indies flowed through her coffers; not knowing that these were barren making streams for her, extinguishing in their passage her own industry

and manufactures, and then passing on to enrich foreign or hostile soils. The secret of her decay was concealed, in great part, not merely from herself, but from others, from all but the most understanding. It was to Spain that our first James just at this period turned, when he sought a wife for his only son, as counting that alliance more desirable than any other in Europe.* And when that marriage came to nothing, and the prospects of a contest with Spain rapidly succeeded those of an alliance with her, how great she still was in the judgment of the statesmen of Europe may be seen from the very remarkable Considerations touching a War with Spain, 1624, by Lord Bacon. 'A war with Spain,' he there declares, is a mighty work' and this, even while the keen-eyed statesman plainly saw that the colossus was not so great in reality as in appearance and reputation, and spied with a searching eye its weaknesses; and, most important of all,

*Calderon was resident in Madrid in the year of Prince Charles' romantic visit to that city—(1623)—a young poet of rising fame, but as yet filling no such office as would cause him to take any share in the shews and triumphs with which that visit was celebrated. A few years later, and we should not probably have wanted some gorgeous mythological spectacle from his pen in which the alliance and future nuptials would have been shadowed forth.

did not fail to note that every day the relative strength of the two states was changing in favour of England, which was ever rising in strength as Spain was falling.

Still the decadence of Spain was not openly acknowledged as yet. Long after others had divined, and even proclaimed, her own duteous children would have refused to see it. They certainly did not perceive it as yet. The near future of their country's fall was hidden from them. They saw not her who a little while before was the chief and foremost among the nations, already failing in the race, to fall presently into the rear, nay to be thrown out altogether from the great onward march of European civilization. It was well, at least for her poets and her painters, that to hide this from their eyes was possible to them still. A very little later, when the symptoms of her rapid decay became more numerous and also more palpable, so that even they could not have missed them, it would have been impossible for a great poet to have arisen in Spain. For a great poet, without a great country, without a great people for him to be proud of, and which in return he feels shall be proud of him, without this action and reaction, never has been, and