In 1880 Unamuno went to Madrid to continue his studies. Passionately attached to his native Bilbao and the wild mountain country in which all his youthful summers had been passed, Unamuno has related how he entered Madrid with tears in his eyes. His spirit never became acclimated to the atmosphere of the capital and the years which he spent there were rendered unhappy by his sense of isolation and home-sickness, preoccupations with ill health, intellectual strain and acute spiritual crises. Having taken his doctor’s degree in philosophy and letters, he presented himself as a candidate for a professorship, first in psychology, logic and ethics, and then in metaphysics; but no doubt owing to a certain uncompromising independence of mind and contempt of the conventional curriculum, he failed to obtain the suffrages of the examiners. After two further unsuccessful attempts to obtain a chair in Latin, he was finally appointed to a professorship in Greek by a board presided over by the famous scholar Menendez y Pelayo. After returning to Bilbao, where he married, he took up his residence in Salamanca in 1891. There he conducted two courses of lectures, one on Greek literature, the other on the evolution of the Castilian language, and nine years later, in 1900, he was appointed to the Rectorship of the University. Unamuno has always been possessed of a formidable capacity for work. His scholastic activities, his administrative duties as head of the University, his participation in municipal affairs, absorbed only a portion of his energies. An omnivorous reader, he is familiar not only with the cultures of the ancient world but with all the modern literatures of Europe and America, most of which his extensive knowledge of languages has enabled him to read in the original. But the fertility of his mind and spirit manifested itself above all in a continual stream of creative work, taking the manifold forms of essays, poetry, novels, criticism and philosophy. His career as a publicist coincided with the period following Spain’s disastrous war with the United States, during which the fortunes of his country appeared to be at their lowest ebb. Unamuno at once took a foremost place in that group of writers and public men, known as “the generation of ’98,” who were preoccupied with the problem of national regeneration. Whereas the majority of the regenerationists, however, pointed to “modernization” and “Europeanization” as the only possible path leading to material and cultural progress, Unamuno advocated a return to the eternal tradition of Spain and held that a spiritual renaissance was the necessary pre-condition of her restoration as a world-power.