JOSE, no-sr. The 'Jose' first published at Madrid 1885) of the contem porary Spanish novelist, Armando Palacio Valdes (born 1853) is not one of the more ambitious of his works. An interesting novelette of manners, portraying actual con ditions of life in the northern maritime dis tricts of Spain, it tells in simple and direct fashion of the tribulations encountered by two lovers of humble station, whose union is thwarted for a while by the machinations of the girl's avaricious and heartless mother and by the operations of a national law which gives parents a tyrannical control over their children contemplating matrimony. The characters are presented in vivid colors on a 'background of sea and shore, and even the figure of the de cayed gentleman, the modern Don Quixote, here called Don Fernando de Meira, escapes the charge of conventionality by conforming so naturally to type. One might wish, however, that the author had not seen fit to make Fernando's end so wretched; perhaps, not withstanding, he felt it imperative to drive home the lesson that for the melancholy aberra dons of hidalgism a corrective is not easily found. In some of the scenes in which the
fishwives play a part with their wordy quarrels and hair-pulling exercises, Valdes must per force descend to the vulgar ; but he r.talizes the danger of the situation and never ventures too far into repugnant detail. Taking him all in all, Valdes, as the author of this successful little idyll and of about a score of novels of the acknowledged worth of his 'Marta y Maria,' his
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