Curiously enough, this literary knight-errant of Spain was born in a land which only by a constitutional fiction can be considered as a part of the Peninsula. He saw the light in the Canary Islands, in 1845. But birth is an accident. From the age of twenty GaldOs belongs to Madrid, and it is Madrid which he describes most willingly, and with a love which years of intimate knowledge did not abate. From his first work, La Fontana de Oro (1870) we begin to see under our eyes the unwieldy irregular town, full of an excitable and good-humoured population ; its vast aristocratic mansions, low masses of granite and brick ; its blocks of flats in which every patio is like a small village, bubbling with gossip and quarrels ; its irregular, ill-paved streets which, like rivers dying in sands, radiate towards the desert over which, as our author says, the heavens rise as spiritual life over the aridity of asceticism '.1 But, though prominent in his books, Madrid takes no more important a place in them than it does in the life of the nation, and GaldOs has succeeded in rendering with equal vividness and felicity the atmosphere of other Spanish towns, whether he conceals their features under an assumed name, as with his FicObriga ' in Gloria or his Orbajosa' in Dona Perfecta, or reveals their whole identity down to the most vivid details of everyday life, as in his admirable rendering of Toledo in Angel Guerra. His knowledge of town and country is precise and detailed. Thus, he compares ' the Ridden harsh, strident outbursts of laughter' of one of his characters in Lo Prohibido to the tearing of cloth which one hears when passing along the Calle de Postas in shopping hours ', a line which makes one pause and dream of his tall, gaunt figure, stealing along the streets of Madrid, a smile on his thin lips, his eyes lost in that waking

1 La Familia de Leon Roch, i.

dream of born observers, in which the mind is at rest but the instinct is alert and watching.

As he watched the life of the town and heard the tearing of cloth in the Calle de Postas, so he seems to have witnessed the life of the whole country during that nineteenth century which will perhaps some day be considered as the true Renaissance of Spain. Spain, like England, placed in the suburbs of Europe, has had a life of her own, subject to a historical rhythm quite different from that of the rest of the continent. Thus though the pioneer of municipal and parliamentary institutions in Europe, Spain arrives at the gates of the nineteenth century in a belated phase of development. Now the nineteenth century is in the history of Spain the constitutional century, not merely in the political, but in the national and cultural sense of the word. It is in the nineteenth century, through a calvary of civil wars, that Spain attains at last a full consciousness of her being. During the nineteenth century, Spain had to assimilate not only the French Revolution, but the Renaissance, and such elements of the Reformation as were not repugnant to her genius. It is a chaotic period of wars, which devastated the body no doubt but certainly stimulated the spirit of the nation. GaldOs began to write almost exactly when the Bourbon Restoration initiated a period of relative stability, in reality the last phase of the struggle. He could look back on a vast field of romantic material which only awaited a great artist to be fashioned into immortal works. He saw his opportunity and proved himself worthy of it.

His Episodios Nacionales are indeed an imposing work. All this romantic material of the nineteenth century is turned to account, from Trafalgar (the title of the first episode) to the beginnings of the present reign. In these forty-six volumes, many of which are admirable, and none of which can be passed over,

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