But Spain had no modern literature to mediate between the old and new; nothing at all corresponding with the schools of romance in Germany, from Herder to Schlegel, which effected a revival of the Teutonic Middle Age 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 than of intimacy.  There was never any such inrush of foreign domination from this quarter as from Italy in the sixteenth century, or from France in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and latter half of the seventeenth.