France, nor do the realists load their palette so heavily. Neither school exaggerates in order to distinguish itself from the other. Perhaps our public is indifferent to literature, especially to printed literature, for what is represented on the stage produces more impression."

This indifference of the Spanish reading public, which has led a living novelist to declare that a person of good position in Madrid would rather spend his money on fireworks or on oranges than on a book, has at length been in a measure dissipated by a writer who is not merely admired and distinguished, but positively popular, and who, without sacrificing style, has conquered the unwilling Spanish public. This is Armando Palacio Valdés, who was born on the 4th of October 1853, in a hamlet in the mountains of Asturias, called Entralgo, where his family possessed a country-house. The family spent only the summer there; the remainder of the year they passed in Avilés, the maritime town which Valdés describes under the name of Nieva in his novel Marta y Maria. He began his education at Oviedo, the capital of Asturias. From this city he went, in 1870, up to Madrid to study the law as a profession. But even in the lawyer's office, his dream was to become a man of letters. His ambition took the form of obtaining at some university a chair of political economy, to which science he had, or fancied himself to have, at that time a great proclivity.

Before terminating his legal studies, the young man published several articles in the Revista Europea on philosophical and religious questions. These articles attracted the attention of the proprietor of that review, and Valdés presently joined the staff. In 1874 he became editor. He was at the head of the Revista Europea, at that time the most important periodical in Spain from a scientific point of view, for several years. During that time he published the main part of those articles of literary criticism, particularly on contemporary poets and novelists, which have since been collected in several volumes—Los Oradores del Ateneo, ("The Orators of the Athenæum"); Los Novelistas Españoles ("The Spanish Novelists"); Un Nuevo Viaje al Parnaso ("A New Journey to Parnassus"), sketches of the living poets of Spain; and, in particular, a very bright collection of review articles published in conjunction with Leopoldo Alas, La Literatura en 1881 ("Spanish Literature in 1881"). These gave Valdés a foremost rank among the critics of the day. He wrote no more criticism, or very little; he determined to place himself amongst those whose creative work demands the careful consideration of the best judges.

Soon after he took the direction of the Revista, Valdés wrote his first novel, El Señorito Octavio, which was not published until 1881. In 1883 he brought out his Marta y Maria, a book which, I know not why, is called "The Marquis of Peñalta" in its English version. This novel enjoyed an extraordinary success, and had more of the graphic and sprightly manner by which Valdés has since been distinguished, than the books which immediately followed it. Spanish critics, indeed, remembering the wonderful freshness of Marta y Maria, still often speak of it as the best of Valdés' stories. In this same year, 1883, he married, at the seaside town of Gijon, in Asturias, on the day when he completed his thirty years, a young lady of sixteen. His marriage was a honeymoon of a year and a half, of which El Idilio de un Enfermo ("The Idyll of an Invalid"), a short novel of 1884, portrays the earlier portion. His wife died early in 1885, leaving him with an infant son to be, as he says, "my allusion and my fascination." His subsequent career has been laborious and systematic. He has published one novel almost every year. In 1885 it was José, a shorter tale of sea-faring life on the stormy coast of the author's native province. About the same time appeared a collection of short stories, called Aguas Fuertes ("Strong Waters").

It was not until 1886, however, that Valdés began to rank among the foremost novelists of Europe. In that year he published his great story, Riverita, one of the characters in which, a charming child, became the heroine of his next book, Maximina, 1887. Of this character he writes to me: "My Maximina in these two books is but a pale reflection of that being from whom Providence parted me before she was eighteen years of age. In these novels I have painted a great part of my life." A Sevillian novice, who has helped to care for Maximina in Madrid, reigns supreme in a succeeding novel, La Hermana San Sulpicio ("Sister San Sulpicio"), 1889. But between these two last there comes a massive novel, describing the adventures of a journalist who founds a newspaper in the provincial town of Sarrió, by which Gijon seems to be intended. This book is called El Cuarto Poder ("The Fourth Power"), and was published in 1888. To these, in 1891, was added La Espuma ("Froth"), of which a translation has already appeared in the "International Library." In 1892 Valdés published La Fé ("Faith").

In La Espuma, his best-known novel, Valdés reverted from those country scenes and those streets of provincial cities which he had hitherto loved best to paint, and gave us a sternly satiric picture of the frothy surface of fashionable life in Madrid. From the illusions of the poor, pathetic and often beautiful, he turned to the ugly cynicism of the wealthy. With his passion for honesty and simplicity, his heart burned within him at the parade and hollowness which he detected in aristocratic and bureaucratic Madrid. One conceives that, like his own Raimundo, he was invited to enter it, took his fill of its pleasures, and found his mouth filled with ashes. His talent for portraiture was never better employed. If he was occasionally tempted to commit the peculiarly Spanish fault of exaggeration—scarcely a fault there, where the shadows are so black and the colours so flaring—he resisted it in his more important characters. The brutality of the Duke de Requena, the sagacity and urbanity of Father Ortega, the saintly sweetness of the Duchess, the naïveté of Raimundo, the sphinx-like charm of Clementina de Osorio, with her mysterious sweetness and duplicity, these are among the salient points of characterisation which stand out in this powerful book. La Espuma was a cry from the desert to those who wear soft raiment in king's palaces. It was the ruthless tearing aside of the conventions by a Knox or a Savonarola. It was stringent satire, yet tempered with an artist's moderation, with a naturalist's self-suppression.

The latest novel which Valdés has published is that which we here present under the title of The Grandee ("El Maestrante"). Here, as it will be seen, the author is no longer engaged in the jarring notes of satire, but, with more lightness and a greater effusion of humour, he dissects the quaint elements which make up old-fashioned society in a provincial city of Spain. This is one of those books which peculiarly appeal to the foreign reader who desires to enter into a phase of life from which his own experience absolutely excludes him. We may suppose that a limited number of Englishmen can penetrate to the palaces and the club-rooms of Madrid, and see something, however superficially, of the life described in Froth. But the grim and ancient mansions which look down through ancient mullioned windows on the narrow streets of such a town as is brought before us in The Grandee—what can the most privileged Englishman possibly know of the manners and customs of their stately inhabitants?

In the second half of the book, the gaiety and grotesqueness of the pictures of life sink before the solemnity of the terrible and tragic corruption of Amalia, and the martyrdom of Josefina. The last pages of The Grandee are, indeed, tinged with almost intolerable gloom, and in a society comparatively so civilised as our own,