If the painter has handed to us by his genius the exact reflection of this Court in a way that makes it live for us more vividly, perhaps, than any other, Quevedo and his followers, especially Velez de Guevara in _El Diablo Cojuelo_, have left in biting prose records no less faithful of its amusements, its follies, and crimes. By the light held up by the satirists we see an utterly decadent society, sunk, from the King downwards, into a slough of apathetic despondency of ever bettering things, whilst each individual strives madly to get as much pleasure as he can wring out of life, by fair means or foul, before the catastrophe overwhelms them all. Faith has decayed, and trembling superstition mixed with scoffing irreverence has taken its place: idleness is everywhere; poverty and squalor seek to masquerade as nobility, in order to claim the privilege to plunder which Court and Church alone possess, and labour is scorned as beneath the subjects of a King so wealthy and powerful as the sovereign of Spain is still assumed to be, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. A pretentious, hollow society it was, where all sought to share in the scramble, even at second or third hand, for the possessions of the State, oblivious to the fact that the State itself could possess nothing but what the individual citizens supplied.
Pretence was not limited to rank and material possessions. The noble poet and satirist kept a sycophantic man of letters to supply him with the lucubrations that moved the Court to admiration when they bore the name of a marquis, the cities swarmed with sham students, who pattered Latin tags, and cadged on the strength of a scholarship that was not theirs: and when showy pageants palled upon the King, and even his beloved comedies failed to spur his jaded wit, Philip could always find solace in the pedantic and affected academies and poetical contests over which he was so fond of presiding in his palace. There well-studied impromptus were mouthed, far-fetched conceits declaimed with a pomposity worthy of inspired prophecy, and preciosity run mad twisted and befouled the noble Castilian speech into the bastard _Latiniparla_, at which Quevedo gibed whilst himself revelling in it.