and with peace his purely intellectual spirit and disquieting irony. With Ramón del Valle-Inclán, again, construction and plot are secondary. The action is slightly sketched in his novels, but incidents and persons are thrown into high relief by the delicate and original character of his style. It is a style built up of all that is rare and exquisite, with a sobriety that chisels a finished picture in a single phrase. In “El Resplandor de la Hoguera,” for instance, a green path leading from a small Basque village to its cemetery is simply described as “todo en paz de oratión,” and such lonely word pictures abound in his writings. His latest work, a trilogy, is “La Guerra Carlista,” and the action of the first part, “Los Cruzados de la Causa” (1908), passes in a village of Galicia. The haughty, great-hearted Gallegan _hidalgo_ Don Juan Manuel, perhaps the best of Valle-Inclán’s vivid character-sketches, appears in this as in many others of his novels. The second part, “El Resplandor de la Hoguera” (1909), follows the broken movements of the guerilla fighting in the intricate Basque country; and the third part (each part forming, however, a separate novel), “Gerifaltes de Antaño” (1909), describes the furtive but daring tactics of that sinister Carlist _cabecilla_, Manuel Santa Cruz, priest of Hernialde, leading his men at night, “swift and silent as a wolf,” by labyrinthine mountain paths, past maize-fields and chestnut-trees and vineyards, and scented meadows under the stars, or ordering execution after execution of men and women “with a mystical coldness and internal peace.” His cruelty was that of the peasant who lights a fire to destroy the plagues of his vineyard. He watched the smoke go up as an evening sacrifice-- “Lo que á unos encendía en amor, á los otros los encendía en odio, y el cabecilla pasaba entre el incendio y el saqueo, anhelando el amanecer de paz para aquellas aldeas húmedas y verdes, que regulaban su vida por la voz de las campanas, al ir al campo, al yantar, al cubrir el fuego de ceniza y llevar á los pesebres el recado de yerba. Era su crueldad como la del viñador que enciende hogueras contra las plagas de su viña. Miraba subir el humo como en un sacrificio, con la serena esperanza de hacer la vendimia en un día del Señor, bajo el oro del sol y la voz de aquellas campanas de cobre antiguo, bien tañidas.”