Fifty years ago, before Zola and the naturalistic school were on the lips of men, a Spanish novelist, José María de Pereda, was beginning to write who can only not be called a naturalist, because of the associations given to the name in France. Humour and frankness run through Spanish literature; there is less artificial refinement and more vigour and broadly human sympathy than in the literature of France. The very language is frank and outspoken rather than subtle and insinuating. And the nobly independent character of Spaniards of all classes counts for much in the admirable sanity of Spanish realism. “Our lowest social strata,” says the Condesa Pardo Bazán, “differ not a little from those described by Zola and the Goncourts.” The Spanish realist has thus no cause to dissect common people and vulgar events from a superior point of view, putting on gloves, as it were, to keep his hands clean. He knows that virtue perches in strange places and learns to see _le sublime d’en bas_, and there is a wide gulf between French naturalism and Spanish realism. Pereda,[110] a _hidalgo_ of the old school, born at Santander on the 6th of February, 1833, spent the greater part of his life in the _Montaña_, at Santander, or at his country estate of Polanco, only leaving Cantabria to study for a few years at Madrid, and later to sit for a few months in the Cortes as a Carlist. The rest of his life he passed among his family and books and friends in his beloved _Montaña_.[111] His friend in private life, Señor Pérez Galdós, describes him as dark, sunburnt, of medium height, with moustache and pointed beard, of a character fundamentally Spanish, and of very nervous temperament, with a horror of conventionality and pretence. It was about the year 1859 that custom and character sketches from Pereda’s pen began to appear in a Santander paper, _La Abeja Montañesa_. They were collected in 1864, and published under the title of “Escenas montañesas.” “Escenas montañesas” gives the essence of Pereda’s art, and, though he later wrote long novels and occasionally attained an admirable unity of treatment, the delight is still in the descriptions of fast-vanishing customs and in the characters of his peasants and fishermen rather than in the thread of the action, which is generally slight; and the strength of his novels lies not in their heroes and heroines but in the secondary figures and the side-shows. “Escenas montañesas” shows us life in Santander and the neighbouring mountain-country as it was half a century ago, and as it now lives permanently in Pereda’s art. Scenes and people are presented to us with extraordinary vividness, and only now and then the sketches read almost too much like observations taken directly from the note-book. We have the picaresque sketch of the _raquero_, the Santander _gamin_ who lives by petty larceny from ships along the quays; the old-fashioned household in a mountain village--by a hereditary privilege Saint John is looked