which prevents them from living in peace or comfort with themselves or with others, a true Spanish failing, peculiarly attached both of old and at the present day to that harsh, turbulent, strongly original character of the race which has never allowed us rest, but kept us perpetually at strife, taking umbrage at our very shadows.”... “While there were infidels to fight, strongholds to defend, vows to fulfil, or even when there were civil wars and vigorous smuggling and bands of brigands,” there was scope for the virtues and vices of a people “born and bred for action and passionate deeds,” “fashioned in battle”; but “on the advent of the moderate customs of modern times” they find themselves “out of their natural atmosphere, idle, poor, disconcerted, cramped.” And this is the tragedy of Spain to-day--a great-hearted people in the toils of civilization. In Pérez Galdós’ “El Caballero Encantado,” the spirit of Spain thus addresses one of her sons: “The capital defect of the Spaniards of your time is that you live exclusively the life of words, and the language is so beautiful that the delight in the sweet sound of it woos you to sleep. You speak too much; you lavish without stint a wealth of phrases to conceal the poverty of your actions.”[10] In an earlier book[11] Señor León deplores the fashion prevailing in Spain “to depreciate all that is Spanish, and to bestow great praise on all that is foreign. A wave of moral cowardice and utilitarian baseness is passing over Spain.” But Spanish character is not permanently weakened nor shorn of its dignity and independence, the eclipse is but temporary and, indeed, partial, not affecting the humbler classes. The spirit of Spain will revive, as in “El Caballero Encantado,” when it is being carried from the death-bed to the grave,[12] and may be aptly likened, as by Don Rafael Altamira, to the waters of the Guadiana which, after flowing for a space underground, return once more to the surface. II.--VAIN GENERALITIES.