The important point is that, more often than not, the proverb is of an essentially dramatic character, It may be considered as a drop of that wisdom distilled

by experience, which is so typical of Spanish letters. It symbolizes one of the three main moods of the Spanish spirit—that in which the mind remains unruffled in the contemplation of men as they are, and therefore, able to see and understand man in his entirety without explaining away—still less suppressing or ignoring—awkward facts. It is in this serene mood that most of the dramatic, epic, and narrative literature, as well as a whole branch of the art of Spain is conceived ; that part of Spanish literature and art which has been here symbolized as a Book of Proverbs.

But Spain has also contributed to the living Bible of Europe a splendid Ecclesiastes. It is much thinner book, for, on the face of it, the thought that all is vanity of vanities is enough to paralyse the pen—unless indeed the pen be driven by the desire to abolish or give relief to the thought itself. I have said that the Spanish mind was homocentric. It is, therefore, consistent in its preoccupation with death, for if it sees man as the king of creation, perforce death must acquire in its eyes the ,importance of a crime of lise-majeste. Man is a king dethroned by death. Spain would not be true to her individualistic faith if she accepted for the solution of the puzzle of life the survival of man in his species or in his works. The race, posterity,—abstractions. The only concrete and living thing is the individual. It is the individual who is king of the world, and it is, he whom death dethrones. The spirit of Spain is dominated by this idea, the shadow of its light, the reaction of its activity. Her intense feeling for life recoils upon her spirit as an equally intense feeling for death. Like those anchorites whom her painters loved to paint, she con-

templates the Light of Life with the skull and crossbones at her elbow. This mood of her creative spirit manifests itself throughout all her literature and art. Towards the close of the Middle Ages, it inspires what is perhaps the most celebrated page of the Spanish Ecclesiastes—the famous coplas of Jorge Manrique on the death of his father

Recuerde el alma dormida, Avive el seso y despierte, Contemplando,

Como se pasa la vida, Como se viene la muerte, Tan callando. . . .

The theme is here handled with that perfect simplicity which is the secret of great masterpieces. It had been for long a favourite subject for Spanish poets, and Gomez Manrique, uncle of Jorge and in the bulk of his work a poet of greater merit, had given almost as good a version of it as that which soon afterwards became its final form. The coplas of Jorge Manrique became the models for generations to come. They were the subject of numberless imitations and glosas, both in verse and in prose, which show that the poet had stirred a sensitive string in the national soul. The theme never disappears from Spanish literature. In lyrical poetry it can be traced to this day, through some of the sombre and most poetic sonnets of Quevedo, for instance, the sonnet which begins

Mire los muros de la patria mia . . .

to poems published but yesterday, such as ' El Pasa-

jero' by Valle InclAn. There is an echo of Jorge Manrique in the beautiful stanzas of La Rosa de Job' : i La vida ! .. . Polvo en el viento

Volador.

i Solo no muda el cimiento

Del dolor !