He is not one of those who look forward to a new heaven and a new earth next week. If you expect to find in him the qualities which you find in Rousseau, or in any other wonder-child of the earthquake and the tempest, you will assuredly be disappointed. But, if we take him for what he is—a satirical observer of character, an artist whose instantaneous presentation of character and of the visible world has a singular relief and saliency—we shall be compelled to assign him a very high place among the realists of Spain. No one who has once met with the frivolous and vindictive Marquesa de Azulejo, with the foppish Vizconde del Cierzo, with the futile Condesa de la Rocaverde, or with Lucas Gómez, the purveyor of patchouli literature, can ever forget them. In this particular of making his secondary figures memorable, Pereda somewhat resembles Dickens, and both use—perhaps abuse—caricature as a weapon. But the element of caricature is more riotous in Dickens than in Pereda, and the acumen in Pereda is more contemptuous than in Dickens. Pereda is in Spanish literature what Narváez was in Spanish politics: he ‘uses the stick, and hits hard.’ Cervantes sees through and through you, notes every silly foible, and yet loves you as though you were the most perfect of mortals, and he the dullest fellow in the world. Pereda has something of Cervantes’s seriousness without his constant amenity. He is nearer to Quevedo’s intolerant spirit. Exasperated by absurdity and pretence, he reverses the apostolic precept: so far from suffering fools gladly, he gladly makes fools suffer. The collection entitled _Tipos trashumantes_ contains admirable examples of his dexterity in malicious portraiture—the political quack in _El Excelentísimo Señor_ who, like the rest of us Spaniards (says Pereda dryly), is able to do anything and everything; the scrofulous barber in _Un Artista_, whose father was killed in the _opéra-comique_ revolution of ’54, who condescends to visit Santander professionally in the summer, and familiarly refers to Pérez Galdós by his Christian name; the hopeless booby in _Un Sabio_, who has addled his poor brain by drinking German philosophy badly corked by Sanz del Río, and who abandons the belief in which he was brought up for spiritualistic antics which enable him to commune with the departed souls of Confucius and Sancho Panza. These performances are models of cruel irony.