and in their stead heroes were enlisted from the veriest dregs of society: du sublime au ridicule il n'y q'un pas. Then eminent men gave full reins to their fancies in baring with bitter sarcasm and mockery, subjects which neither alarmed nor offended the powers of Church and State; then Spain set the example to the world in her Picaresque, or Rogues' March tales, of which Lazarillo de Tormes, the first and foremost, was written about 1523, by Diego de Mendoza, one of her noblest soldiers, statesmen, and historians. Forty-five years afterwards, it was imitated in style and purport by Mateo Aleman, in his Guzman de Alfarache, and also by Cervantes, Quevedo, Espinel, Guevara, Solorçano, Salas Barbadillo, and others; in their arch-Spanish pages were described tricks and shifts, the sayings and doings of unprincipled idlers and needy disbanded adventurers, thrown loose to prey on society by the cessation of wars foreign and domestic, in a word of the mendicant vermin which pride, allied to poverty, has rendered indigenous in Spain. To them we owe Gil Blas, and largely as Le Sage borrowed from Spanish originals, his book is infinitely more witty and French-polished than any of its coarser prototypes, which assuredly it will long survive. It was before these racy realities that novels of fiction failed, with the one exception of the Wars of Granada, by Gines Perez de Hita. This charming work, in which a tissue of sweetest ballads is interwoven, was, in truth, the forerunner of Scott's historical romances.

The drama of Spain deserves especial notice; the theatre, put down by the early Christians as pagan and profane, was in due time enlisted into the service of the Vatican, who amused and instructed a dull dark

age with dramatized legends and religious truths and mysteries. The first buddings of the secular stage are to be traced about 1472 in the satirical eclogues of Mingo Revulgo; they ripened under Lope de Vega, who, with his successor, Calderon de la Barca, ruled the boards from 1604 to 1681. The histriomastrix church succumbed for a time under the Royal influence of the pleasure and play-loving Philip IV. Mr. Ticknor dedicates 123 pages to Lope de Vega; Lord Holland having, however, familiarized us with the details, we will only observe, that Lope impressed on the drama a truly Spanish physiognomy by his defiance of the unities, classicalities, and foreign things of the "Erudite" party; he took the people for his patrons, and found in them earnest and steady allies; to please them was his sole study; holding up the mirror to his times, and reflecting truly a profligate court and city, he became the idol, the phoenix of his day; he trusted for success in his fabulously numerous productions, more to labyrinths of intrigues, scenic situations, and complicity of plots, than to nice delineation of character or deep searchings into the human heart; he lacked the mens divinior of a real poet, and was at best a prodigal improvvisatore in verse; drawing as he did a variety of man, not the species, he was the creature of a period, of a fashion, and now he is gone out. His plays pall on the theatres of Spain, and defy the book-gluttony of Germany; he has strutted his hour on the stage, while Shakspeare, nature's darling, who drew mankind, lives and will live as long as the human race. Lope, in our mind, is inferior to the brilliant melodious Calderon in the expression of the exciting passions of

revenge and jealousy; to Calderon Mr. Ticknor has given 66 pages, and a whole chapter to Quevedo. He too has passed away, and now, the Aristophanes of his day is but a name; few ever read his works, his wit is neither fine nor polished, his sarcasm is savage, his style is obscure and grotesque. Two other Spanish dramatists only need be mentioned, since greater names have made theirs European, Guillen de Castro, whose Cid was imitated by Corneille-Gabriel Tellez (Tirso de Molina), whose Don Juan formed the ground-work to Beaumarchais, Mozart, Rossini, and Byron.

The literature of Spain in common with her arts, arms, glories, and almost name, perished with her Austrian dynasty, whose last sovereign, the imbecile Charles II., was fitted for a fallen state. Then the war of succession handed Castile over to France, its antipathy, antithesis, and antipodes. The Versaillese-bred Philip V. soon warred against Spanish nationalities, in order to raise on its ruins his country's one-sided civilization. Then ensued the dreary age of Grand Monarque patronage, of Royal Academies, who follow the funerals of patients whom they never can resuscitate or reproduce. Paris and Gallicism set the ton to Madrid, and poor, marrowless foreign copies superseded pithy, homebred originals. We cannot follow Mr. Ticknor in dragging from the dust of oblivion these intolerable mediocrities, whom posterity willingly would let die; we respect his inimitable patience, and now in bidding him farewell, our best thanks must be tendered for the mass of accurate information contained in his genuine work. Not one made up of borrowed erudition, or second-hand quotation, it is the labour of love, the

fruit of 30 years' honest, hard reading of his wellstocked library, the finest of its kind in America; our author is full of his subject to overflowing, and from the perhaps unavoidable necessity of giving a complete series of Spanish authors and a catalogue of books he is sometimes oppressed with his learning, as David was by the heavy armour of Saul; occasionally we were jaded with dry details, and felt that a considerable portion of his volumes, and notes especially, were less suited for the reading-desk than the bookcase; but no library of any pretensions can dispense with this matterpregnant work. The style of Mr. Ticknor suits the professor; it is clear, precise, and unaffected. Without being lively or poetical, he interests in his descriptions, and is impartial and unprejudiced in his criticisms; here and there the fastidious ear of the Old Country will trace a tone of constraint, which Americans writing this high class of English can scarcely quite escape. Taken as a whole, the work is the best that has ever appeared on its subject, and certainly will insure to Mr. Ticknor a lasting and honourable reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.

SIR JOHN FRANKLIN.

69

ARCTIC EXPEDITIONS.*

"WHAT news of Sir John Franklin?

Have any

traces of his whereabouts been discovered? Has any light been thrown upon the fortunes of himself and his crews?" Such are the inquiries which the announcement of any new narrative of an Arctic Expedition will elicit from almost every Englishman, and until these questions are answered it would be a mere waste of time to expatiate on geographical or geological discoveries, or to unfold additions to the Flora and Fauna Borealis. Dr. Sutherland, who appears to have literally followed Sir John Franklin's recommendation to his officers to "observe everything from a flea to a whale," has accumulated in the volumes before us many useful facts in natural history and meteorology, to which, however, due attention will scarcely be paid until anxiety about Sir John Franklin's fate is somewhat allayed. We hasten, then, to say, on the authority of

* 1. Journal of a Voyage in Baffin's Bay and Barrow's Straits in 1850-51, performed by Her Majesty's ships Lady Franklin and Sophia, under the command of Mr. William Penny, in search of the missing crews of Her Majesty's ships Erebus and Terror. By Peter C. Sutherland, M.D., M.R.C.S.E., surgeon to the expedition. 2 vols. Longmans. 1852.

2. Papers and Despatches relating to the Arctic Searching Expeditions of 1850-51-52; together with a few brief remarks on the probable course pursued by Sir John Franklin. Collected and arranged by James Mangles, Commander, R.N. Rivingtons. 1852.