What makes this more interesting is that nowhere is there more what he calls _vertigo_, than in B. A., Rio. I read all their magazines. They are brilliant, just as aggregated diamonds are brilliant. This, what he has just been saying, is what Spanish and Portuguese neighbors think of us. I could not count the number who have said something similar to me. In it there is unconscious aristocratic disdain of king-lovers for a young, ill-bred, free, and too noisy people who boast of democracy when they do not boast of dollars. We bow our heads to the superiority of Latin culture. They swung a long time from Caesar’s coat-tail. We did not. In fact, we are just beginning to swing. And not from Caesar’s. The Spanish-Americans write noble, flexible prose. Carillo’s prose has rhythms both ample and fine. He sends stinging arrows, some of which hit, at New York, Chicago, America. He is of the opinion that cities that are beautiful, (meaning those of the Old World), are dirty and uncomfortable. Our _comfortable_ clean cities, on the other hand, are ugly. They are something with which he does not like to profane fine, sensitive eyes. He hates Broadway. His sensuous, sumptuous soul loves the lasting summer of rich hued tropic lands, their languid, their sapphire seas, and perfected luxury of living. His description of what he calls _Oxford of the Argentine_, makes me wish I were a boy, young, so I could go there. It is a magnificent idea, which the Spaniards have put into execution in this school, an idea worthy the dramatic genius of Latin peoples. He becomes lyric over the avenues, parks, of Buenos Aires, in one of which he remembers to tell us he found Rodin’s _Thinker_. Carillo is learned. He possesses charm with power of distinguished seeing. I have read him for years. He is seldom disappointing, unless he writes a story. In the story he lacks architectural sense-structure. _La Lampara Maravillosa_, by Valle-Inclán is a charming piece of book-making; richly illustrated, printed in two colors, red and black, and from the Sociedad General Española de Libreria, Madrid. I have seen lovely books from there! I wish I could buy them all. Even if one could not read them, they are pleasant to look at, like objects of art. Valle-Inclán is a dreamer, a maker of poetic prose. I recall a merry caricature of his long, thin, black, owl-eyed, glasses-berimmed Spanish face in a magazine of Mexico. Probably the magazine was _Tricolor_. _The Magic Lamp_, in this book, renews memory, a memory rich with the accumulation of a thousand years. It has charm, inventive grace. There is a touch to be sure here and there in the prose of the Spanish church-fathers; something monastic, shadowed, hieratic, a trifle pedantic. The gesture of a priest, in short, a lingering, regretful, graceful gesture, for beauty of a world which is passing, and which he should not pause too often to see. His prose is great enough to serve as a model for writers.