When Cervantes created ‘Don Quixote,’ the greatest and most delightful of satires, the perfect picture of Spanish national life and manners, that exquisite ‘Book of Humanity’ as Sainte Beuve calls it, he had it in mind to laugh away and burlesque out of existence those foolish romances of chivalry so prevalent in his day, which he held to be in deplorable taste and fraught with harm for the morals of his country. How well he succeeded, all the world knows.

Two centuries later, Spain brought forth a second Cervantes, a satirist of hardly less eminence, but scarcely known to Englishmen of the present day. He too produced a ‘Book of Humanity,’ a lively study of national character; he too had it in mind to laugh away and ridicule into nothingness something which he held to be dangerous to Spain and a slur on her good name. And he too, on a more modest stage, achieved his object. His book in its only English translation, that of 1772, lies before us in faded calf volumes, as we write: ‘The History of the famous Preacher, Friar Gerund de Campazas.’

The author, still well remembered in Spain, which held a literary festival in his honour as recently as 1903, on the occasion of the second centenary of his birth, was a Jesuit, one Jose Francesco de Isla, whose life covered the years 1703—1781. He was a professor at Salamanca and a popular preacher and director, with pronounced literary tastes and almost unexampled gifts of satire and humour.