I have never been able to feel any enthusiasm for Spanish politicians. We hear a great deal about CÁnovas. CÁnovas has always impressed me as being as bad an orator as he was a writer. When I first read his Bell of Huesca, I could not contain myself for laughing. As far as his speeches are concerned, I have also read a few, and find them horribly heavy, diffuse, monotonous and deficient in style. I hear that CÁnovas is a great historian, but if so, I am not acquainted with that side of him.

Castelar was unquestionably a man of exceptional gifts as a writer, but he failed to take advantage of them, and they were utterly dissipated. He lacked what most Spaniards of the 19th Century lacked with him; that is, reserve.

When Echegaray was made Minister of Finance, he was already an old man. A reporter called one day to interview him at the Ministry, and Echegaray confessed that he was without any very clear idea as to just what the duties of his office were to be. When the reporter took leave of the dramatist, he remarked:

"Don JosÉ, you are not going to be comfortable here; it is cold in the building. Besides, the air is too fresh."

Echegaray replied:

"Yes, and your description suits me exactly."

This cynically cheap joke might have fallen appropriately from the tongues of the majority of Spanish politicians. Among these male bailarinas, nearly all of whom date back to the Revolution of September, we may find, indeed, some men of austere character: SalmerÓn, PÍ y Margall and Costa. SalmerÓn was an inimitable actor, but an actor who was sincere in his part. He was the most marvellous orator that I have ever heard.

As a philosopher, he was of no account, and as a politician he was a calamity.

PÍ y Margall, whom I met once in his own home where I went in company with AzorÍn, was no more a politician or a philosopher than was SalmerÓn. He was a journalist, a popularizer of other men's ideas, gifted with a style at once clear and concise. PÍ y Margall was sincere, enamoured of ideas, and took but little thought of himself.

As to Costa, I confess that he was always antipathetic to me. Like Nakens, he was a man who lived upon the estimation in which he was held by others, pretending all the while that he attached no importance to it whatever. Aguirre Metaca once told me that while he was connected with a paper in Saragossa, he had solicited an interview with Costa, and thereupon Costa wrote the interview himself, referring to himself here and there in it as the Lion of Graus. I cannot accept Costa as a modern European, intellectually. He was a figure for the Cortes of Cadiz, solemn, pompous, becollared and rhetorical. He was one of those actors who abound in southern countries, who are laid to rest in their graves without ever having had the least idea that their entire lives have been nothing but stage spectacles.