would invariably remember his duty at the psychological moment, and with
many moving expressions renounce her: in fact he is a devil at
renouncing women. I wonder it flatters them.

Contrast with this pattern of excellence, eminently praiseworthy if
somewhat dull, Don Juan Tenorio, who stands in exactly the same relation
to the Andalusians as does John Bull to the English. He is a worthless,
heartless creature, given over to the pursuit of emotion. The main
lines of the story are well known. The legend, so far as Seville is
concerned, (industrious persons have found analogues throughout the
world,) appears to be founded on fact. There actually lived a Comendador
de Calatrava who was killed by Don Juan after the abduction of his
daughter. The perfect amorist, according to the _Cronica de Sevilla_,
was then inveigled into the church where lay his enemy and assassinated
by the Franciscans, who spread the pious fiction that the image of his
victim, descending from its pedestal, had itself exacted vengeance. It
was an unfortunate invention, for the catastrophe has proved a
stumbling-block to all that have dealt with the subject. The Spaniards
of Molina's day may not have minded the clumsy _deus ex machina_, but
later writers have been able to make nothing of it. In Moliere's play,
for instance, the grotesque statue is absurdly inapposite, for his Don
Juan is a wit and a cynic, a courtier of Louis XIV., with whose sins
avenging gods are out of all proportion. Love for him is an intellectual
exercise and a pastime. 'Constancy,' he says, 'is only good for fools.
We owe ourselves to pretty women in general, and the mere fact of having
met one does not absolve us from our duty to others. The birth of
passion has an inexplicable charm, and the pleasure of love is in
variety.' And Zorilla, whose version is the most poetic of them all, has
succeeded in giving only a ridiculous exhibition of waxworks.

But the monk, Tirso de Molina, who was the first to apply literary form
to the legend, alone gives the character in its primitive simplicity. He
drew the men of his time; and his compatriots, recognising themselves,
have made the work immortal. For Spain, at all events, the type has been
irrevocably fixed. Don Juan Tenorio was indeed a Spaniard of his age, a
man of turbulent instincts, with a love of adventure and a fine contempt
for danger, of an overwhelming pride; careful of his own honour, and
careless of that of others. He looke