The style of Cervantes changes with his characters, who are allowed to murder Castilian in Spanish-Basque or Gascon-Catalan, but he is a master at will of the purest Castilian, in him never divorced from the full flavour of life, and he refers scornfully to the spurious continuation of “Don Quixote” as “written in Aragonese.” Equally _castizo_, hardily idiomatic and flavoured pungently, is the style of Quevedo. Of modern writers, Valera and Pereda, differing so widely, are alike in this, that they are both masters of noble Castilian prose, and have nothing to say to the imported phraseologies which pervade a large proportion of modern Spanish writing. Pérez Galdós, too, has a thoroughly Spanish style, robust and vigorous, rich in words, idiomatic. The most recent Spanish writers in a novellizing spirit tread more delicately; they resemble Sancho Panza, who, “when he was Governor, learnt to eat fastidiously, _á lo melindroso_, so that he would eat grapes and even the seeds of a pomegranate with a fork.” The style of León, indeed, is full and fine-sounding, and, like that of Valera, carries us back to the writings of the mystics in the sixteenth century; but Valle-Inclán (guilty only very occasionally of words such as _madama_ or _dandy_) and _Azorín_ have a mastery of deliberately thin, exquisitely clear-cut prose.[115] “Llovía menudo y ligero en aquella fertil valle del Baztan....”; in this passage of Valle-Inclán’s “Gerifaltes de Antaño” (1909), as in so many others, we have a delicate finished picture, reached after much labour of rejection and compression, though he has the art to conceal his _affres du style_. In a language so inexhaustibly rich as the Spanish, and with the tendency of Spaniards to write in hurried, copious fashion, this choice and sifting of words is welcome, and is in no danger of being carried to excess. XXIII TOLEDO AND EL GRECO