this, in which Calderon is the central figure, is one. Greece, England, and Spain are the only three countries, in the western world at least, which boast an independent drama, one going its own way, growing out of its own roots, not timidly asking what others have done before, but boldly doing that which its own native impulses urged it to do; the utterance of the national heart and will, accepting no laws from without, but only those which it has imposed on itself, as laws of its true liberty, and not of bondage. The Roman drama and the French are avowedly imitations; nor can all the vigour and even originality in detail which the former displays, vindicate for it an independent position; much less can the latter, which, at least in the nobler region of tragedy, is altogether an artificial production, claim this; indeed it does not seek to do so, finding its glory in the renunciation of any such claim. Germany has some fine plays; but no national dramatic literature; the same must be said of Italy; and the period has long since past for both when it would have been possible that this want should be supplied.

For us, who behold Spain only in the depth of her present bankruptcy, literal and figurative,

That six

it is difficult to realize the lofty elevation of power and dignity and honour at which she stood in the sixteenth century, and, while as yet the secret of her decadence was not divined, during a portion of the seventeenth; the extent to which the Spaniard was honoured with the fear, the admiration, and the hatred of the rest of Europe. teenth had been for him a century of achievements almost without parallel. At the close of the century preceding, the Christians of Spain had brought their long conflict with the infidel at home to a triumphant close. But these eight hundred years of strife had impressed their stamp deeply on the national character. 'As iron sharpeneth iron,' so had this long collision of races and religions evoked many noble qualities in the Spaniard, but others also most capable of dangerous abuse. War with the infidel in one shape or another had become almost a necessity of the national mind. The Spanish cavalier might not be moral, but religious, according to that distinction between morality and religion possible in Roman Catholic countries, he always must be, by the same necessity that, to be a gentleman, he must be well born and courteous and brave.

The field for the exercise of this Christian chi

All

valry at home was no sooner closed to him than other and wider fields were opened. Granada was taken in 1492; in the very same year Columbus discovered a New World, to the conquering of which the Spaniard advanced quite as much in the spirit of a crusader as of a gold-seeker; and we wrong him altogether, at least such men as Cortez, if we believe that only the one passion was real, while the other was assumed. exploits of fabled heroes of romance were outdone by the actual deeds of these conquerors— deeds at the recital of which the world, so long as it has admiration for heroic valour and endurance, or indignation for pitiless cruelty, will shudder and wonder. But this valour was not all to be lavished, nor these cruelties to be practised, on a scene remote from European eyes. The years during which Cortez was slowly winning his way to the final conquest of the Mexican Empire, were exactly the earliest years of the Reformation in Europe (1518-1521). This Reformation, adopted by the North of Europe, repelled by the South, was by none so energetically repelled as by the Spaniards, who henceforward found a sphere wide as the whole civilized world in which to make proof that they were the most Christian of all Christian nations,

the most Catholic of all Catholic. Spain did not shrink from her part as champion of the perilled faith, but accepted eagerly the glories and the sacrifices which this championship entailed. Enriched by the boundless wealth of the Western world, having passed in Philip the Second's time from freedom into despotism, and bringing the energies, nursed in freedom, to be wielded with the unity which despotism possesses, she rose during the sixteenth century ever higher and higher in power and consideration.

It was towards the end of that century, that is, when Lope de Vega took possession of the rude drama of his country, and with the instincts of genius strengthened and enlarged, without disturbing, the old foundations of it, that the great epoch of her drama began. All that went before was but as the attempts of Kid and Peele, or at the utmost of Marlowe, in ours. The time was favourable for his appearance. Spain must, at this time, have been waiting for her poet. The restless activity which had pushed her forward in every quarter, the spirit of enterprize which had discovered and won an empire in the New World, while it had attached to her some of the fairest provinces and kingdoms of the Old, was somewhat subsiding. She was

willing to repose upon her laurels.

The wish

had risen up to enjoy the fruits of her long and glorious toils; to behold herself, and what was best and highest in her national existence, those ideals after which she had been striving, reflected back upon her in the mirrors which art would supply; for she owed her drama to that proud epoch of national history which was just concluding, as truly as Greece owed the great burst of hers, all which has made it to live for ever, to the Persian War, and to the elevation consequent on its successful and glorious conclusion. The dramatic poet found every thing ready to his hand. Here was a nation proud of itself, of its fidelity to the Catholic faith, of its championship, at all sacrifices, of that faith, possessing a splendid past history at home and abroad, a history full of incident, of passion, of marvel, and of suffering; much of that history so recent as to be familiar to all, and much which was not recent, yet familiar as well, through ballad and romance which everywhere lived on the lips of the people. Here was a nation which had set before itself, and in no idle pretence, the loftiest ideals of action; full of the punctilios of valour, of honour, of loyalty; a generation to whom life, their own life, or the