scrupulous cleanliness, no art but that of an instinctive and natural elegance. He was small and thin, as if all his person had been concentrated in his beautifully expressive head—where his eyes shone with a smile not altogether devoid of a point of mischievous irony which was welcome in a face radiant with human kindness.

He never married. Yet he prized the joys of family life above all others, and the company of children was indispensable to him. He found an ideal home in the house of his favourite disciple, Don Manuel B. Cossio, the eminent art critic who has done so much to make the world appreciate the real greatness of El Greco. Here, under the shadow of the InstituciOn which he had founded and which absorbed much of his time, Don Francisco lived long years of quiet but deep and intense action. His method was that of personal influence—the transmission of that mysterious magnetism which all great teachers possess and seem to carry in their own persons, for it does not act through the dead letter of their teachings and requires their presence and figure. Whether in his class-room at the University or at the Instituckm, or in the drawing-room of his house or in his frequent ramblings with friends and pupils through the hills and dales of the Sierra, Don Francisco was always the same : not a professor, not a pedagogue, but a friend, a companion, a spiritual guide, a giver of courage to the weak, of counsel to the strong, of graceful and delicate rebuke to the straying—a being, as Maeztu has admirably said of him, more flame than light.

His mind had that Socratic humility which is content to wait for truth and leave to it the care of its own defence—that humility, indeed, which comes from confidence, not in one's own mind, but in the Oneness of the mind of Nature. That was the secret of the apparent contradiction between his intellectual

DON FRANCISCO GINER   69

steadfastness and his real, not merely courteous, tolerance of other people's opinions. His method was by suggestion and stimulation, rather than by direct statement, and he often achieved by indirect example conversions which no direct argument could have brought about.

No man was ever worthier of bearing the name of the saint of Assisi. Don Francisco Giner was a true Franciscan, and his whole life was instinct with that universal love with which St. Francis enriched the spirit of the world. It is worthy of notice in this connexion that Don Francisco detected the value of GalolOs at the very beginning of the career of this great novelist whose works are so deeply instilled with that sense of universal love. In this respect the few pages which Giner devoted to the study of GaldOs in the early days of their public life are significant, and reveal a deep spiritual relationship between two great Spanish figures of the nineteenth century otherwise wide apart in their life-work and outlook.

Differing in this from most of the progressive men of his time in Spain, Don Francisco was fervently religious. He never belonged to any definite confession, but he lived his religion far more truly than do the immense majority of those who label their beliefs with one or other of the current labels. His soul was typically Spanish in its blend of mysticism and militancy, of action and contemplation. Indeed, he would agree with St. Teresa, or for that matter with Don Quixote himself, in the view that action and contemplation are but two aspects of one and the same thing, and that the one is of no avail without the other. Don Francisco lived up to this Golden Rule of Spanish religious life. The outward sign of this rule is a complete lack of self-seeking.

Hence, the spiritual radiance which emanated from his figure. Don Francisco stands as the source of