ing to conform in the midst of modern life to
the ascetic ideals of the mediaeval saints, even to the point of
wearing hair-cloth and beating her tender shoulders with a scourge.
Galdos's 'Dona Perfecta' and 'The Family of Leon Roch' combat the
undue influence of the confessor, or religious adviser, in the family,
and 'Gloria' combats the immemorial bitter prejudice against the Jews.
As may be seen, many of these subjects, if approached in a flippant
way, might easily lend themselves to grossness and scandal; but such
is not the Spanish spirit. The tone towards the Church is severely
critical, but not destructive. It is the true secular tone of this
century, which holds that a conventional attention to the things of
the next world is only due when all demands for benevolence towards
living men are satisfied. Howells points out that Galdos attacks only
the same intolerant eccelesiastical spirit that elsewhere would be
known by another name. These critics would "reform the party from
within"; and as they handle with so much skill and consideration the
sensibilities of their countrymen who still adhere to the fold, their
efforts are the more likely to have a potent effect. It seems a
curious anomaly that Pereda, the one of them who is the most modern
and stirring in the intellectual way, professes himself the champion
of monarchy in its most absolute form.

The beginnings of the present fiction are somewhat feebly found in
Antonio de Trueba, and Madame Boehl de Faber, who signed herself
"Fernan Caballero,"--one of the first of those who took a man's name,
after the fashion of George Sand. These first wrote of other things
than the romantic knights and castles, Moors and odalisques, of Scott
and Victor Hugo. Fernan Caballero (1797 to 1877), a genial optimist
who wrote idealized descriptions of nature, still has a certain vogue.
Perez Escrich produced a large number of novels of a humanitarian
cast; Fernandez y Gonzalez poured them out, of a cheap order, in a
torrent, and became the very type of hasty production. Pedro de
Alarcon figures as a kind of link uniting the earlier period to the
present, and such a book as his 'El Sombrero de Tres Picos' (The
Three-Cornered Hat) is said to be read by some of the present
generation with admiration. But it seems to others a trifle, of no
great merit, marred by an excessive straining after effect; nothing in
it is simply or naturally said. Students of the more realistic side of
the m