Without the lyric fervour of Montalvo, heavy and dusty as an ancient palimpsest, Vigil represents the struggle of Peruvian liberalism against the power of {242} the Church. Born in 1792, he was a priest, and abandoned his calling, but without retaining, like Renan, the unction of the seminarist. A stoic in his life, the champion of liberty in several Congresses, he devoted his riper years to a long campaign against ecclesiastical privilege. His admirable erudition served him in this propaganda. He defended the State against the encroachments of the clergy. An idealist, he preached universal peace, the union of all American nations, and expounded the excellencies of the democracy, in whose Christian virtues he, like Montalvo, firmly believed. He won respect, as did Bilbao, by the austerity of his life and the sincerity of his exhortations: a Socratic master whose life was harmonious as a poem. An Argentine thinker, genial and tumultuous, Sarmiento represented a liberalism less coherent than that of Echeverria, but as a champion of the ideal and the intellectual life in the democracy tyrannised over by Rosas he deserves to be placed beside Lastarria and Montalvo. Menendez Pelayo called him the _gaucho_ of the Republic of Letters; for his pugnacious individuality, his barbaric impetuosity, and his semi-culture, which was mitigated by admirable intuition, were inimical to all classic order or discipline. Sarmiento was a romantic by temperament; he attacked Spanish culture in the name of French liberalism, and condemned tradition, which led to slavery; he believed in the virtuality of ideas, the mission of education, and the greatness of democracy. He applied to the United States for models of popular education, and for political examples of federal life. He was a teacher, a journalist, a pamphleteer, and a President. He analysed Argentine life and the American revolutions; in 1845 he published _El Facundo_, an evocation of the Argentine civil wars, with all the passion and lyrical fervour of a Michelet. Sarmiento {243} was the enemy of Rosas, as Montalvo was the eloquent rival of Garcia-Moreno. In _El Facundo_ are pages of pitiless criticism of the tyranny of the federal _caudillo_. Exiled, he founded a review in Chili, in 1842, in which he still attacked Rosas, but he did not confine himself to ephemeral journalism. He discovered eternal elements in the battles of the time; he studied the American man and the American soil, as in the prologue to _El Facundo_. He then studied the racial problem, and in another book described the ideal republic of which he dreamed. His work is profoundly American.