power of the
same creative imagination, a drama in which the same vivid reality is
informed by the same breath of magical romance. In the tragedy of Lope
de Vega, in the comedies of Calderon, with all the distinctive
individuality of the great artists, and of each great work of art, we
have a poetic drama which is in its essential characteristics the same
as that of England.

And yet how different were the circumstances of the two nations, Spain
was decadent, bankrupt, defeated; England was rising to the supreme
heights of its greatness under Elizabeth and Cromwell. At the end of the
sixteenth century, Spain had passed its splendid meridian and was
falling into the grey obscurity of a clouded evening. It had quickly
lost the great place which for a few years it had held in the world,
every day brought a new failure, every year a new disaster; the great
Armada had perished miserably on the dunes of Flanders and Holland, on
the cliffs of Scotland and Ireland; a handful of valiant Dutchmen had
defied its power and broken its wealth; the real enemy of Spain, that is
France, had gathered itself together after forty years of ruin and
misery, and had driven out the Spanish power. Indeed, so great, so
overwhelming, was--as we can now see it--the ruin, that Philip II, who
to the English imagination has stood for the embodiment of cruel and
masterful malignity, has become to the historical student one of the
tragic figures in history, a sincere, stupid, bigoted man, vainly
striving to hold together the great empire which had been created by
Ferdinand and Isabella, by Cortez and Pizarro and Charles V.

England, on the other hand, was rising from obscurity to its place as
the mistress of the seas; Englishmen were raiding and plundering the New
World, which Spain and Portugal had looked on as their own; England was
sending out its sailors and merchants to all the seas, and to all lands,
from the frozen north to the Indies.

And again, Spain was possessed by a fierce and passionate love for the
old religious order, it was the one country in which devotion to the
forms and conceptions of mediaeval religion had proved unshakeable,
while England was the representative power of the new religious temper,
and was soon to hold almost the foremost place in the new intellectual
life of Europe.

And yet the drama of Spain is in all its most essential and intimate
characteristics the same as that of England; represents on the one side
the