SOURCE: "The Picaresque and Peripatetic Novels in England," in Spanish Influence on English Literature, Eveleigh Nash, 1905, pp. 156–83.

In the following essay, Hume argues that the development of the novel form in Spain had a direct influence on the development of the picaresque and peripatetic novel in England.

… The special reason why the Spanish new realistic fiction should have been forced to adopt for its medium the representation of squalid scenes and thievish, cunning adventurers, is to be found in the invariable rule of reaction or revulsion when anything is carried to an undue extreme. The tone of the Spanish romances of chivalry had been so ineffably heroic, the personages so unselfishly noble, the surroundings so invariably regal, that the reaction had necessarily to be exactly the opposite. I shall point out to you presently that, as the romances of chivalry had not in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries...