The beginnings of the present fiction are somewhat feebly found in Antonio de Trueba, and Madame Boehl de Faber, who signed herself "Fernan Caballero,"--one of the first of those who took a man's name, after the fashion of George Sand. These first wrote of other things than the romantic knights and castles, Moors and odalisques, of Scott and Victor Hugo. Fernan Caballero (1797 to 1877), a genial optimist who wrote idealized descriptions of nature, still has a certain vogue. Perez Escrich produced a large number of novels of a humanitarian cast; Fernandez y Gonzalez poured them out, of a cheap order, in a torrent, and became the very type of hasty production. Pedro de Alarcon figures as a kind of link uniting the earlier period to the present, and such a book as his 'El Sombrero de Tres Picos' (The Three-Cornered Hat) is said to be read by some of the present generation with admiration. But it seems to others a trifle, of no great merit, marred by an excessive straining after effect; nothing in it is simply or naturally said. Students of the more realistic side of the movement should read Madame Pardo Bazan's valuable critical study, 'La Cuestion Palpitante' (The Vital Question). Various books by the leading authors named have been well translated into English by Clara Bell, Mrs. Mary J. Serrano, Mary Springer, Rollo Ogden, Nathan Haskell Dole, and others. II Benito Perez Galdos was born May 10th, 1845, in the Canary Islands. Las Palmas, his birthplace, capital of the Grand Canary, is a well-built little town of about eighteen thousand people, and the island is the most fertile of the group. In climate and situation the islands belong rather to Africa than Europe. The people are considered descendants of the Gothic inhabitants of Spain, who sought refuge there from the Saracen invasion. Their existence was all but lost to sight for some centuries, and they were only brought under European sway about the time of the discovery of America. These Fortunate Islands, the somewhat unusual scene where Galdos was born and passed his youth, would seem to offer a fresh literary field, yet no word of description or reminiscence concerning them appears in any of his books. This is perhaps part of the policy of reserve that induces him to deny, even by implication, any biographical details concerning himself,--a reserve so marked as to have been generally noted as an eccentricity. Leopoldo Alas, his biographer, in the 'Celebridades Espaniolas Contemporaneas,' assures us that it was only with the greatest difficulty he drew from him the bare admission that he was born in the Canary Islands. He made his studies there in the State college, and came to Madrid at the age of eighteen to study law. He had no great liking for it, and did not follow it further, unless as it became a step for entrance into political life, for he has been a deputy in the National Cortes, for Porto Rico. He did not acquire