"Fascinated by his books, Ramirio began to imagine himself the hero of the story. He was in turn Julius Cæsar, the Cid, the Great Captain, Cortes, Don Juan of Austria. To take up the _Commentaries_ was to lead the legions across Gaul, but, on the Ides of March, more sagacious than the Dictator, he discovered the treachery of Junius Brutus and, concealing a sword under his toga, he entered the Senate House and slew the conspirators one by one. He conquered the Moors on countless fields, he offered to Spain the kingdom of Naples or the empire of Montezuma, and finally, planting his foot on the prow of a strange ship, he destroyed for ever the whole Turkish fleet, at a new and marvellous Lepanto, which his imagination evoked from the prints. The result was that he began to deem himself chosen by God to carry on the tradition of deathless fame. He put away from his mental view the mediocre, the commonplace, the humdrum. All that was not impulsive and heroic seemed intolerable, for he felt in himself an absolute confidence of winning at a blow the highest honours and becoming, in a short time, one of the foremost knights of the Catholic Faith on earth." The book is in many ways one of the most remarkable works of the imagination that has been created by an Argentine and Sr. Larreta writes pure and nervous Spanish. Last comes a branch of literature which is probably the most popular, and certainly the most esteemed, in Spanish America, which takes mediocre poets far more seriously than did Horace, or, indeed, than is the habit of the more stolid East. A somewhat sardonic French traveller[91] lately remarked: "Spanish America has only one thought--love. And love has given to it the one art which it practises, if not in perfection at least in abundance inexhaustible--lyric poetry. It appears that Peru and Colombia and Guatemala possess great poets.... Being a foreigner, I cannot judge about their greatness, but I can see that they are numerous, indeed innumerable. Not a newspaper but contains every morning poems, and their invariable burden is the passion of love. The eyes, the teeth, the lips, the hair, the hands and feet of the American misses are here, one by one, compared to all the beauties of earth and sky. The warmth of sentiment is undoubted, but the expression lacks originality." There seems, indeed, to be an inexhaustible demand for a kind of verse which a foreigner has a great difficulty in judging, owing to difference in national temperaments and, perhaps still more, differences in national ages. A thousand years makes a great difference in a nation's point of view, and much that seems fresh and beautiful to the younger people is hackneyed and tedious to the older. The poetry of Argentina and, it is said, of all Latin America, appears to be erotic or spasmodic, or both. It is pretty, but it has not sufficient freshness to conquer a hearing in the great world.