is likely to be prejudiced against Pérez de Guzmán, and is certain to think poorly of his judgment as a literary critic. It is not as a literary critic that Pérez de Guzmán excels, nor is he a poet of any striking distinction; but as a painter of historical portraits he has rarely been surpassed. In the first place, he can see; in the second, he writes with a pen, and not with a stick. He is an excellent judge of character and motive, and he is no respecter of persons—a greater thing to say than you might think, for as a rule it is not till long after kings and statesmen are in their graves that the whole truth about them is set down. And it is the truthfulness of the record which makes Pérez de Guzmán’s _Generaciones y Semblanzas_ at once so impressive and entertaining. There is no touch of sentimentalism in his nature; rank and sex form no claim to his indulgence; he is naturally prone to crush the mighty and to spare the weak. If a queen is unseemly in her habits, he notes the fact laconically; if a Constable of Castile foolishly consults soothsayers, this weakness is recorded side by side with his good qualities; if an Archbishop of Toledo favours his relatives in little matters of ecclesiastical preferment, this amiable family feeling is set off against other characteristics more congruous to his position; if an _Adelantado Mayor_ has a bright bald head and pulls the long bow when he drops into anecdotage, these peculiarities are not forgotten when he comes up for sentence. There is no rhetoric, no waste: the person concerned is brought forward at the right moment, described in a few trenchant words, and discharged with a stain on his character. The _Generaciones y Semblanzas_ is not the work of an ‘impersonal’ historian who is most often a sophist arguing, for the sake of argument, that black is not so unlike white as the plain man imagines. Pérez de Guzmán goes with his party, has his prejudices, his likes and dislikes, and he makes no attempt to dissemble them; but he is never deliberately unfair. The worst you can say of him is that he is a hanging judge. He may be: but the phrase in which he sums up is always memorable for picturesque vigour.