Something of this polemical strain runs through all his romances, and, after the fall of the republic and the restoration of the Bourbons, his conservatism may have contributed to make him popular in the late seventies and the early eighties. But we are twenty or thirty years removed from the passions of that period, and Pereda’s work stands the crucial test of time. He is not specially skilful in construction, and digresses into irrelevant episodes; but he can usually tell his tale forcibly, and, when he warms to it, with grim conciseness; he is seldom declamatory, is a master of diction untainted by gallicisms, and records with caustic humour every relevant detail in whatever passes before his eyes. He is the chronicler of a Spain, reactionary and picturesque, which is fast disappearing, and will soon have vanished altogether. If the generations of the future feel any curiosity as to a social system which has passed away, they will turn to Pereda for a description of it just before its dissolution. He paints it with the desperate force of one who feels that he is on the losing side. His interpretation may be—it very often is—imperfect and savagely unjust; but its vigour is imposing, and, if his world contains rather too many degraded types, it is also rich in noble figures like Don Román Pérez de la Llosía in _Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera_, and in profiles of humble illiterates who, in the eyes of their artistic creator, did more real service to their country than many far better known to fame.