These moralisings are the unessential and disfiguring element in Fernán Caballero’s unconscious art. It is something to be able to tell a story with intelligence and point, and this she does constantly. And, besides the power of narration, she has the characteristic Spanish faculty of undimmed sight. When she limits herself to what she has actually seen (and, to be just, her expeditions afield are rare), she is always alert, always attractive by virtue of her delicate, feminine perception. Many phases of life are unknown to her; from other phases she deliberately turns away; hence her picture is necessarily incomplete. But she sympathises with what she knows, and the figures on her narrow stage are rendered with dainty adroitness. There is no great variety in her tableau of that mild Human Comedy which, with its frugal joys and meek sorrows, it was her office to describe; but it has the note of sincerity. Her methods are as realistic as those used in later romances professing to be based on ‘human documents’—a phrase now worn threadbare, but not yet invented when she began to write. She reverted by instinct to realism of the national type,—realism which was fully developed centuries before the French variety was dreamed of,—and it was in the realistic field that her successors won triumphs greater than her own. Some ten or twelve years after the appearance of _La Gaviota_, Antonio de Trueba leapt into popularity with a succession of stories all of which might have been called—as one volume was called—_Cuentos de color de rosa_. In the past my inability to appreciate Trueba as he is appreciated in his native province of Vizcaya has brought me into trouble. Each of us has his limitations, and, fresh from reading Trueba once more, I stand before you impenitent, persuaded that, if he flickers up into infantile prettiness, he sputters out in insipid optimism. We cannot all be Biscayans, and must take the consequences. In the circumstances I do not propose to deal with Trueba,—who, like the rest of us, appears to have had a tolerably good conceit of himself,—nor to spend much time in discussing the more brilliant Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. Alarcón seems likely to be remembered better by _El Sombrero de tres picos_—a lively expansion in prose of a well-known _romance_—than by any of his later books. All literatures have their disappointing personalities: men who at the outset seemed capable of doing anything, who insist on doing everything, and who end by doing next to nothing. Nobody who knows the meaning of words would say that the author of _El Sombrero de tres picos_ did next to nothing, but much more was expected of him. Whether there was, or was not, any reasonable ground for these high hopes is another question. The ‘Might-Have-Been’ is always vanity. Save in such rare cases as that of Cervantes, who published the First Part of _Don Quixote_ when he was fifty-eight (the age at which Alarcón died in 1891), imaginative writers have generally