There is a feminine, if not a falsetto timbre in the voice of JOSÉ SELGAS Y CARRASCO (1824-1882), a writer on the staff of the fighting journal, _El Padre Cobos_, and a government clerk till Martínez Campos transfigured him into a Cabinet Minister. Selgas' verse in the _Primavera_ is so charged with the conventional sentiment and with the amiable pessimism dear to ordinary readers, that his popularity was inevitable. Yet even Spanish indulgence has stopped short of proclaiming him a great poet, and now that his day has gone by, he is almost as unjustly decried as he was formerly overpraised. Though not a great original genius, he was an accomplished versifier whose innocent prettiness was never banal, whose simplicity was unaffected, whose faint music and caressing melancholy are not lacking in individuality and fascination. A more powerful poetic impulse moved the Sevillan, GUSTAVO ADOLFO BÉCQUER (1836-1870). An orphan in his tenth year, Bécquer was educated by his godmother, a well-meaning woman of some position, who would have made him her heir had he consented to follow any regular profession or to enter a merchant's office. At eighteen he arrived, a penniless vagabond, in Madrid, where he underwent such extremes of hardship as helped to shorten his days. A small official post, which saved him from actual starvation, was at last obtained for him, but his indiscipline soon caused him to be set adrift. He maintained himself by translating foreign novels, by journalistic hack-work in the columns of _El Contemporaneo_ and _El Museo Universal_, till death delivered him.