In this frame of mind, habitual with him, he sat down to write _Pepita Jiménez_. The story is the simplest imaginable. Pepita, a young widow, is on the point of marrying Don Pedro de Vargas, when she meets his son Luis, a young seminarist with exaggerated ideas of his own spiritual gifts. Luis is a complete clerical prig, who disdains such everyday work as preaching the gospel in his own country, and vapours about being martyred by pagans. As he has not a vestige of religious vocation, the end is easily foretold. At some cost to her own character Pepita pricks the bubble, and all the young man’s aspirations melt into the air; he is made to perceive that his pretensions to sanctity are silly, marries the heroine who was to have been his stepmother, and subsides into a worthy, commonplace husband. In his _Religio Poetae_ Patmore praises _Pepita Jiménez_ as an example of ‘that complete synthesis of gravity of matter and gaiety of manner which is the glittering crown of art, and which, out of Spanish literature, is to be found only in Shakespeare, and even in him in a far less obvious degree.’ Patmore has almost always something striking to say, and even his critical paradoxes are interesting. We have no means of knowing how far his Spanish studies went, but we may guess that his acquaintance with Spanish literature was perhaps not very wide, and not very deep. As regards Pepita Jiménez his verdict is conspicuously right: it is conspicuously wrong with respect to Spanish literature as a whole. The perfect blending of which he speaks is as rare in Spain as elsewhere. In Valera it is the result of deliberate artistic method; his gravity is a necessity of the situation; his gaiety is rooted in his sceptical politeness. In his critical work his politeness is decidedly overdone; he praises and lauds in terms which would seem excessive if applied to Dante or Milton. He knows the stuff of which most authors are made, presumes on their proverbial vanity, and flatters so violently that he oversteps the limits of good-breeding. Some of you may remember the dignified rebuke of these tactics by Sr. Cuervo. But in his novels Valera strikes no attitude of impertinent or sublime condescension. He analyses his characters with a subtle and admirably patient delicacy.