tyle,
second to none produced in any country--a novel full of fire, and yet
irreproachable in taste, handling a difficult subject with the mastery
of genius. It has been translated into English; but however well it may
have been done, it must lose immensely in the transition, because the
Spanish of Valera is the perfection of a perfectly beautiful language.
In this novel we have the character of a priest, who, while we know him
only through the letters addressed to him by the young student of
theology, the extremely sympathetic hero of the story, lives in one's
memory, showing us the best side of the Spanish priest. Other novels of
Valera's, _Dona Luis_ and _El Comendador Mendoza_, a number of essays on
all sorts of subjects, critical and other, and poems which show great
grace and correctness of style, have given this writer a high place in
the literature of the age.

Perez Galdos is a writer of a wholly different class, although he enjoys
a very wide reputation in his own country and wherever Spanish is read.
His _Episodes Nacionales_, some fifty-six in number, attract by their
close attention to detail, which gives an air of actuality to the most
diffuse of his stories. They are careful and very accurate studies of
different episodes of national life, in which the author introduces,
among the fictitious characters round whom the story moves, the real
actors on the stage of history of the time. Thus Mendizabal, Espartero,
Serrano, Narvaez, the Queen of Ferdinand VII., Cristina, and many other
persons appear in the books, giving one the impression that history is
alive, and not the record of long-dead actors we are accustomed to find
it. Galdos appears to despise any kind of plot; the events run on, as
they did in fact run on, only there are one or two people who take part
in them whom we may suppose to be creations of the author's brain.
Certainly, one learns more contemporary history by reading these
_Episodes_ of Perez Galdos, and realises all the scenes of it much more
vividly than one would ever do by the reading of ordinary records of
events. As the tendency and the sympathy of the writer is always
Liberal, one fancies that Galdos has written with the determined
intention to tempt a class of readers to become acquainted with the
recent history of their country who would never do so under any less
attractive form than that of the novel. His works must do good, since
they are very widely read, and are extremely acc