It is a striking volume, but the distinguishing traits of _Bocetos al temple_ are precisely those which characterise _Escenas montañesas_. Pereda has developed in the sense that his touch is more confident, but his point of view is the same as before. Take, for example, _La Mujer del César_, the first story in the book: the moral simply is that it is not enough to be beyond reproach, but that one must also seem to be so. You may call this trite or old-fashioned in its simplicity, but it is not ‘provincial.’ What is true is that the atmosphere of _Bocetos al temple_ is ‘regional.’ The writer is not so childish as to suppose that Madrid is peopled with demons, and the country hill-side with angels. Pereda had no larger an acquaintance with angels than you or I have, and his personages are pleasingly human in their blended strength and weakness; but he had convinced himself that the constant virtues of the antique world are hard to cultivate in overgrown centres of population, and that the best of men is likely to suffer from the contagion of city life. To this thesis he returned again and again: in _Pedro Sánchez_, in _El Sabor de la Tierruca_, in _Peñas arriba_, he argues his point with the pertinacity of conviction. There is nothing provincial in the thesis, and it is good for those of us who are condemned to live in fussy cities to know that we, too, seem as narrow-minded as any fisherman or agricultural labourer. Can anything be more laughably provincial than the Cockney, or the _boulevardier_, who conceives that London, or New York, or Paris is the centre of the universe, that the inhabitants of these places are foremost in the files of time? Nobody is more provincial than an ordinary dweller in one of these large, straggling, squalid villages. Pereda is not afflicted with megalomania; he is not impressed by numbers; he does not ‘think in continents.’ He believes all this to be the bounce of degenerate vulgarians, and leaves us with a disquieting feeling that he may not be very far wrong.