And your parents,- how are they going to take my conduct? Most likely, after indignantly scoring me as I shall deserve, they will order me out of their house, and never let me set foot in it again."

"Very good, very good: then marry her, I say, and I wish you joy of her," said Venturita, springing up very pale.

"Never! that will never be. I shall either marry you or nobody else in all the wide world."

"Then what are we going to do?"

"Oh, I don't know, I don't know;" his head drooping in abject sadness.

A silence fell upon them for a moment, broken by Venturita, who said, tapping lightly on his bowed head, "Rack your brains, man; invent something."

"I'm trying and trying, but nothing comes of it."

"You are good for nothing. Come, you must go now. Leave the thing to my charge. I will speak to mama. But you must write a letter to Cecilia."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Venturita!" he protested in anguish of soul.

"Then don't do it, and what is the next step on the programme, tell: do you think I am going to serve as a plaything for you?"

"If I could only dispense with writing such a letter," he responded, cringing with humility. "You cannot imagine what violence it does to my whole nature. Would it not do, instead, if I should cease coming to the house for some days?"

"Yes, yes, it would. Off with you now, and don't come back,” said the girl, herself moving towards the door to depart. But he restrained her, by one of her braids of hair.

"Don't be offended with me, my beautiful one," he entreated. "Well you know that you have enchanted me, that you tread me under the sole of your pretty foot. In the long run I shall do whatever you want me to, even to jumping into the sea if you desire it. I was only trying to spare Cecilia suffering."

"Conceited fellow! I'll wager now you think Cecilia will die of love for you."

"If she gives herself no great concern, so much the better; I shall thus escape enduring remorse."

"Cecilia is cold; she neither loves nor hates with any warmth of feeling. Her disposition is excellent; selfishness has no part

that is,

in it; you would find her always exactly the same,neither gay nor sad. She is apathetic, incapable of being wounded by any disappointment, at least, if she is, she never shows it. What are you doing there?" she broke off, rapidly whirling around to face him.

"I was trying to unbraid your hair. I wanted to see it loose, as you let me see it once before. There is not a more beautiful sight in the world."

"I don't know that I object, if it is your whim to see it,” replied the maiden,—who was proud, and with reason, of her wealth of shining hair.

"What loveliness! it is one of the wonders of the world." He touched the flowing locks gently; weighed them in his hands with delight; then, taken with a sudden enthusiasm, he cried, "I must bathe in them; let me bathe in this river of molten gold."

[At this moment one of the sewing-girls, sent after some patterns, chanced to enter the room. Gonzalo looked up, paler than wax; the servant colored violently with confusion. Venturita alone kept her calmness. First managing to make her finger bleed by an adroit blow against the wardrobe, she said coolly:-]

"O Valentina, won't you do me the favor to tie up my hair. I cannot do it myself, on account of having hurt my finger" (showing it). "Don Gonzalo was just going to try, but he would make very awkward work of it."

JUAN VALERA

(1827-)

BY WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP

UAN VALERA was born in 1827, at Cabra, a village of the

Department of Cordova. He has identified himself greatly with his delightful native district of Andalusia, in the scenes of his novels; but personally he has led for the most part a life far from rural scenes, a life of great capitals, long residence in foreign lands, active political as well as literary movements, and high honors and emoluments. It is a kind of life calculated to sharpen the natural intelligence, and confer ease and distinction of manners. His friend and admirer, Cánovas del Castillo, the late premier of Spain, accordingly said of him, as bearing upon the accuracy of his descriptions of social matters: "Mas hombre de mundo que Valera no le hay en España" (More man of the world than Valera there is not one in Spain). His father was a rear admiral, his mother the noble Marchioness Paniega. He was educated at two religious schools,one at Malaga, the other on the Sacro Monte at Grenada, the same quarter that still contains the gipsies in their rock-cut dwellings. He very early entered upon the career of diplomacy. He was secretary of legation successively at Naples, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden, and St. Petersburg; and later has been Spanish minister to the United States and some other countries. He has also been at various times deputy to the Cortes, high official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, Director of Public Instruction, and is now a life senator and a member of the Council of State. He was one of the eight eminent Spaniards commissioned by the nation to go and offer the crown to Prince Amadeo of Italy, after the overthrow of Isabel II. in 1868. As a political writer, he collaborated with the group of talented men, under José Luis de Albareda, who conducted El Contemporáneo (The Contemporary), a liberal review which overturned the ministry of Marshal O'Donnell. The same Albareda, later, founded La Revista de España (The Spanish Review), in which a good deal of Valera's work has appeared.

Valera has been also a professor of foreign literatures, and he is a member of the Spanish Academy. He has attempted many varieties of literary work, and been eminent in all. It might fairly be assumed from his smooth, harmonious, polished style, that he had written

verses; and such is the case. Of his collected Poems' (1856), 'El Fuego Divino' (The Fire Divine) is esteemed as among the best; a composition of thoroughly modern touch, yet in the vein of the mystical Fray Luis de Leon of the sixteenth century. His poetry comprises many paraphrases or translations from the Portuguese, the German, and the English,-excellent renderings of Whittier, Lowell, and W. W. Story, being found among the last. He is above all things a scholar and a critical essayist; a considerable number of his published volumes consist of collected essays or discourses before the Spanish Academy, covering such subjects as 'The Women Writers of Spain, St. Teresa,' and the like,-not the moderns; 'Studies of the Middle Ages'; 'Liberty in Art'; and 'The New Art of Writing Novels,' -largely a discussion of French Naturalism. Cartas Americanas' (American Letters) is a small volume, with a kindly touch, devoted to an inquiry into the merits of the current literature of the Spanish Americas.

All that he does is characterized by scholarship and a rich culture. He himself confesses that he wrote his first novel, 'Pepita Ximenez,' 1874, without knowing that it was a novel. In fiction, his achievement is summed up in the having produced this one really great book, universally admired, 'Pepita Ximenez,' and a number of others. of far inferior merit. He holds that the object of a novel should be the faithful representation of human actions and passions, and the creation, through such fidelity to nature, of a beautiful work; and he considers it a debasement of a work of art to attempt, for instance, to prove theses by it, or to reduce it to any strictly utilitarian end. 'Pepita' is a novel of "character," not of action. It has been complained that there is almost as great a lack of adventure in some of our modern fiction as there was a superabundance of it in the older sort; but no intelligent mind can fail to be carried along with the development of this most impressive and charming moral drama, slow, contemplative, and philosophic though the stages be by which it seems to move. How thoroughly, how exhaustively, are the situation and the problems of character worked out! This completeness and steadiness of attention are a very modern trait in fiction, as contrasted with the old picaresque stories, otherwise equally natural, upon which it is based. In that day, the scene, the personages, had to be continually changed, as for an audience that could not keep its mind fixed upon anything more than a few minutes at a time. In 'Gil Blas,' the robber cavern alone was material enough for a full volume; yet there it was but an episode, quickly giving place to an interminable succession of others.

In 'Pepita Ximenez,' Valera is fortunate enough to have an almost elemental passion to treat,- a subject like some of those of Shakespeare: the moral crisis of a young ecclesiastic, torn between earthly

and heavenly love. Don Luis, the son of a worldly father, comes home to the family estate in Andalusia for a short vacation, preparatory to taking orders. A handsome, well-built young man, he has been devoutly reared by his uncle, the dean of a cathedral in a distant town; and his head is full of the sincerest dreams of religious self-sacrifice, of exile, and even perchance martyrdom, in the Orient. His father wishes him, rather, to marry and inherit his wealth. It is not quite clear just what part of the final result is due to the affectionate machinations of those nearest him in his family, and what to unaided nature and the delightful fascinations of Pepita. She is a very young widow, of but eighteen, the widow of a rich old man who had been very kind to her. It is springtime in flowery Andalusia; and Pepita's discretion and reserve of character, her high-bred charm, her beauty, soon take hold upon Don Luis. The story is told chiefly in his letters to the dean. "The worst of it is," he writes, "that with the life I am leading I fear I may become too worldly minded." Soon it is: "He that loves the danger shall perish in it;" and finally an agony of appeal: "Oh, save me! Oh, take me away from here, or I am forever lost." What was Pepita's part in it? Was she in some sense the ally of his father, who gave out that he wanted to marry her himself,- or did she love the handsome young theological student from the first? She loves him madly at last; and it is due to her own quite desperate persistence in the end that he is lost to the Church, and gained to secular life.

The author has not the gift of facile conversation: his characters rather dissertate to one another than talk. They incline to discuss at great length abstract questions of morals, theology, or taste; the pretty women only refrain from this at the cost of not talking at all. Even at the supreme moment of their probable parting forever, Luis and Pepita speak set orations. Still these orations are full of thought and have an innate interest.

In 'Doña Luz' (1878) we have again the same beautiful, high-bred kind of a woman as Pepita. She is "like a sun at its zenith." As she passes in the street, the bystanders murmur with the exaggerated Andalusian gallantry, "There goes the living glory itself." And again there is an interesting young priest; but all passes platonically. Doña Luz marries a brilliant man of the world, but he has sought her only for her fortune; she lives apart from him, and finds solace in her child.

>

'Las Ilusiones del Doctor Faustino (The Illusions of Doctor Faustus: 1876) is the most ambitious of Valera's novels, but not correspondingly successful. It is a reminiscence of Faust; undertaking to show in the career of the poor and haughty young patrician, Mendoza, the many changes of purpose, belief, and fortune, the philosophic doubts and baffled aspirations, that may attend the life of man on