ge and impressed it upon contemporary England and
France. Neither could the Spanish Middle Age itself show any such
supreme master as Dante, whose direct influence on English poetry has
waxed with the century. There was a time when, for the greater part of a
century, England and Spain were in rather close contact, but it was
mainly a hostile contact, and its tangential points were the ill-starred
marriage of Philip and Mary, the Great Armada of 1588, and the abortive
"Spanish Marriage" negotiations of James I.'s reign. Readers of our
Elizabethan literature, however, cannot fail to remark a knowledge of,
and interest in, Spanish affairs now quite strange to English writers.
The dialogue of the old drama is full of Spanish phrases of convenience
like _bezo los manos_, _paucas palabras_, etc., which were evidently
quite as well understood by the audience as was later the colloquial
French--_savoir faire_, _coup de grace_, etc.--which began to come in
with Dryden, and has been coming ever since. The comedy Spaniard, like
Don Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," was a familiar figure on the
English boards. Middleton took the double plot of his "Spanish Gipsy"
from two novels of Cervantes; and his "Game of Chess," a political
allegorical play, aimed against Spanish intrigues, made a popular hit and
was stopped, after a then unexampled run, in consequence of the
remonstrances of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. Somewhat later the
Restoration stage borrowed situations from the Spanish love-intrigue
comedy, not so much directly as by way of Moliere, Thomas Corneille, and
other French playwrights; and the duenna and the _gracioso_ became stock
figures in English performances. The direct influence of Calderon and
Lope de Vega upon our native theatre was infinitesimal. The Spanish
national drama, like the English, was self-developed and unaffected by
classical rules. Like the English, it was romantic in spirit, but was
more religious in subject and more lyrical in form. The land of romance
produced likewise the greatest of all satires upon romance. "Don
Quixote," of course, was early translated and imitated in England; and
the _picaro_ romances had an important influence upon the evolution of
English fiction in De Foe and Smollett; not only directly through books
like "The Spanish Rogue," but by way of Le Sage.[7] But upon the whole,
the relation between English and Spanish literature had been one of
distant respect rather