This harmony becomes still more apparent if we consider an age nearer our own. For example, take the great Spanish epoch of the sixteenth and a part of the seventeenth centuries, in which lived the great painters, Velasquez, Murillo, Zurbaran, Francisco de Herrera, Alonzo Cano, and Morales; and the great poets, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Don Luis de Leon, Guilhem de Castro, and so many others. You know that at this time Spain was entirely monarchical and Catholic; that she had over-come the Turks at Lepanto; that she planted her foot in Africa and maintained herself there; that she combated the Protestants in Germany, pursued them in France and attacked them in England; that she subdued and converted the idolaters of the new world, and chased away Jews and Moors from her own soil; that she purged her own faith with autodafés and persecutions: that she lavished fleets and armies, and the gold and silver of her American possessions, along with her most precious children, the vital blood of her own heart, upon multiplied and boundless crusades, so obstinately and so fanatically, that at the end of a century and a half she fell prostrate at the feet of Europe, but with such enthusiasm, such a burst of glory, such national fervor, that her subjects, enamored of the monarchy in which their power was concentrated, and with the cause to which they devoted their lives, felt no other desire than that of elevating religion and royalty by their obedience, and of forming around the Church and the Throne a choir of faithful, militant, and adoring supporters. In this monarchy of crusaders and inquisitors, preserving the chivalric sentiments and sombre passions, the ferocity, intolerance, and mysticism of the middle ages, the greatest artists are the very men who possessed in the highest degree the faculties, sentiments, and passions of the public that surrounded them. The most celebrated poets--Lope de Vega and Calderon--were military adventurers, volunteers in the Armada, duellists and lovers, as exalted and as mystic in love as the poets and Don Quixotes of feudal times; they were passionate Catholics and so ardent that, at the end of their lives, one became a familiar of the Inquisition, others became priests, and the most illustrious among them--the great Lope de Vega--fainted on saying Mass, at the thought of the sacrifice and martyrdom of Jesus. Everywhere may be found similar examples of the alliance, the intimate harmony existing between an artist and his contemporaries; and we may rest assured that if we desire to comprehend the taste or the genius of an artist, the reasons leading him to choose a particular style of painting or drama, to prefer this or that character or coloring, and to represent particular sentiments, we must seek for them in the social and intellectual conditions of the community in the midst of which he lived.