A foreign influence is unquestionably visible in the novels of both Armando Palacio Valdés and the Condesa Pardo Bazán—perhaps the most gifted authoress now before the public. The existence of this foreign element is denied by partisans, but it would not be disputed by the writers themselves. Was not the Condesa Pardo Bazán the standard-bearer of French naturalism in Spain during the early nineties? We are apt to forget it, for what she then called ‘the palpitating question’ palpitates no more. Who can read the Condesa Pardo Bazán’s _Madre Naturaleza_ without being reminded of Zola, or Palacio Valdés’s _La Hermana San Sulpicio_ without being reminded of the Goncourts? Yet in _La Hermana San Sulpicio_, where Gloria is the very type of the sparkling Andalusian, and in the still more charming _Marta y María_ which appeared some years earlier, there is a genuine original talent which fades out in _La Espuma_ and _La Fe_. In these last two books Palacio Valdés does moderately well what half a dozen French novelists had done better. One vaguely feels that Palacio Valdés is losing his way, but he finds it again in the Spanish atmosphere of _Los Majos de Cádiz_ where we see Andalusia once more through Asturian spectacles. As to the Condesa Pardo Bazán, she has unfortunately diffused her energies in all directions. No one can succeed in everything—as a poet, a romancer, an essayist, a critic, a lecturer, and a politician. Yet the Condesa Pardo Bazán is all this, and more. We would gladly exchange all her miscellaneous writings for another novel like _Los Pazos de Ulloa_, where the peasant is displayed in a light which must have pained Pereda. Is Galicia so different from the Mountain? But extremes meet at last. Dr. Máximo Juncal in _La Madre Naturaleza_ thinks with Pereda that townsfolk are beyond salvation: only—and the difference is capital—he would leave nature to work her will without the restraints of traditional ethics. Clearly all women are not hampered by timidity and conservative instincts! But Palacio Valdés may be read for the constant, acrid keenness of his appreciation of character, and the Condesa Pardo Bazán for her vigorous portraiture of the Galician peasantry, and her art as a landscape painter.