The author of the plays here done into English was born in Madrid on the Thursday in Holy Week of sixty-three years ago. In spite of a fair indication to go by, his friends are responsible for the curious assertion that he himself does not know, or has not taken the trouble to verify, the exact date of his birth. A reference to familiar sources of chronology enables us to make a respectful claim to better information on the point than the person most concerned. So the day of SeÑor Echegaray’s birth maybe fixed precisely as the 19th of April, 1832.

The first three years of the dramatist’s life were passed in the capital of Spain. In 1835 he was removed from Madrid by his father, who had just obtained the appointment of Professor of Greek at the Institute of Murcia. It was in Murcia that JosÉ received the rudiments of his education; and while still a child he entered the institute. Here he studied Latin under Professor Soriano, Natural History under Angel Girao, and Greek under his own father. The boy was early seen to be gifted with brain-power of the first order. And being of a docile and amiable nature, of active and laborious habits, having the advantage of excellent tutors, and being under the supervision of a kind and cultured father, it is hardly to be wondered at that his progress in learning was great and rapid. From the first he displayed that passion for mathematics which has never grown cool in him throughout life. His interest in literature itself was far from absorbing. He showed, indeed, some liking for novels and romantic dramas. For tragic writers of the stamp of Corneille and Racine he could not conceal his disrelish, though the fairness of his mind would never permit him to ignore or deny the many beauties of the classic drama. When he was fifteen years old he became Bachelor of Philosophic Science, and proceeded to Madrid in the month of October, 1847, to prepare for entrance into the Escuela de Caminos. In this great school the mathematical professor was Angel Riguelme, under whose able tuition young Echegaray devoted himself with increased ardour to his favourite study. His affection for literature, it is true, had been gradually strengthening. In the midst of his graver studies he had also frequented the theatres. But he never failed to return with an almost frenzied delight to the branch of knowledge which afforded such food to his voracious intellect. To use his own language, he “studied the higher mathematics ferociously, ravenously.” It has been maintained that in all the records of Spanish scientific history no one has ever been known to devote more eager and profound study to mathematics than JosÉ Echegaray. His whole spirit seemed to be inextricably identified with the subject, to be indissolubly enchained to it. Mathematics became for him the most absolute of necessities, the supreme of joys. The following is an experience related by a fellow student of Echegaray when both were at the Escuela de Caminos. “Every Saturday our professor of mathematics was fond of setting us problems of the most difficult kind, the solutions of which we were expected to hand in on the Monday. On a certain occasion the problem given out to us was of such an excruciatingly intricate nature that the huge majority of the class had to give up all hope of mastering it. I was among the unsuccessful ones. I had seen Saturday, Sunday, pass over without bringing me nearer to a glimpse of light. On the Monday morning I was all at once inspired with the idea of going to Echegaray to obtain some hint on a question which could not have failed to occupy his attention at least as much as mine. It was an hour before the time appointed for the opening of the Escuela and the delivering up of the answers. I set out for Echegaray’s lodging. I found my friend in his room. The curtains were drawn and the shutters were fastened over the windows. On the chimney-piece was an expiring lamp. On the edge of the bed—the clothes of which were tossed about in much disorder—sat Echegaray in his nightshirt. His head was bent, and he was in an attitude of deep thought. The noise which I made on entrance was as unsuccessful as my friendly greeting in withdrawing him from his abstraction. He confined himself to raising his hand with a gentle but expressive motion, and to saying ‘Hush!’ Suddenly he bounded up, undressed as he was, and, to my stupefaction, exclaiming, ‘Here it is!’ hurried across to a small board close at hand. He commenced to draw lines upon lines and circles upon circles, and dash down figures here and there, till at length he said, ‘The whole night have I been thinking of that problem, and—look there!’ And he drew back to show me the signs all fairly traced, the operation completed, the problem solved. This rehearsed performance he repeated in school that morning. He alone did it, to the admiration and almost to the alarm of the professor himself, who, I think, had really given out the problem without much serious thought of any one even attempting a solution.”

Echegaray had entered the Escuela de Caminos in 1848. He finished his course of study in 1853, carrying off with him the highest honours that the institution could bestow, and being placed far and away the first of all his contemporaries. Meanwhile the literary and dramatic instinct lay almost entirely asleep in him. It sprang up fitfully now and then in a curiosity to assist at the initiatory performances of pieces by first-rate, second-rate, and even third-rate authors. Echegaray was always held up as an exemplary pupil; he fulfilled his duties at school with almost exaggerated obedience and scrupulousness; and yet once—only once—he ran out of the Escuela de Caminos without permission that he might not be too late to buy tickets for the first night of Ayala’s drama, “El Hombre de Estado.” On leaving the Escuela, then, in 1853, Echegaray had already seen many dramas, and had read a vast number of French, English, Italian, and Portuguese novels, ancient and modern, of all kinds. But he had not himself essayed anything in literature. He had not written a verse. The making of verses appeared to him a thing quite foreign to his nature. In this the enemies of Echegaray are affable enough, for once, to agree with him; and they remain constant to their belief when he has long since had ample reason for changing his mind. The mathematical rigidity and angularity of much of his poetry, say these enemies, is not compensated for even by the daring originality of his conceptions, his nobility of sentiment, the richness of his imagery, the splendour of his language; they deny to him, for instance, the exquisite ease and melody of Espronceda, the bird-like spontaneity and perhaps fatal fluency of JosÉ Zorilla. In short, during these days of his dawning manhood, Echegaray had never dreamed of being a poet, still less a dramatic genius.

The requirements of his profession as tutor of mathematics, to which he now formally addressed himself, took him to various important cities—Granada, Almeria, Palencia—thus keeping him away for years from the capital, where he was destined to shine in whatever he undertook. At last the moment came for his return to Madrid. He was elected Professor of Mathematics at the Escuela de Caminos, at the very institution where he had achieved such triumphs as a boy and a young man, and where he had left behind him so many pleasing remembrances. And now his professional engagements, and the extraneous tasks which he voluntarily imposed on himself, scarcely left him time to breathe. During the thirteen years of his occupation of the mathematical chair an immense number of classes had the advantage of his teaching of the Infinitesimal Calculus, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Curve-tracing, Descriptive Geometry and its applications, Solid Geometry, and so on into the dimmest heights of the science. During this time he devoted himself to Political Economy, to Philosophy, to Geology, and to another study, entered upon with slight equipment by many men, very seriously and with all his faculties by this man—Politics. At the Bolsa and the Free Exchange Propaganda he delivered orations full of subtle thought and sound doctrine; in the Ateneo he spoke enthusiastically in favour of pure democracy; in presence of the Society of Political Economy he pronounced numerous discourses appropriate to their several occasions, and distinguished by an order of eloquence which was looked upon as remarkable, even in a capital where almost every one seems endowed with the gift of picturesque and ready speech. He published different articles in the Economista, La Razon, and other periodicals—it seeming impossible that he should give his attention to multitudinous labours of this kind, and at the same time devote eight or ten hours of his days and nights to private lessons in mathematics and to public lectures on other subjects, among which were Physics and Naval and Military Engineering. Such excessive work would have paralysed a nature less vigorous than Echegaray’s, but in the continuance of a portion of it he was unexpectedly stopped. The private lessons which he had been giving would have raised an independence for him. They were prohibited. Echegaray was made a victim of the administrative despotism to which the authorities of the Escuela de Caminos were compelled to bow. He applied for a special license; it was refused. In his indignation he was about to leave the Escuela. But there he was assured that he would be acting ill-advisedly. If he indeed abandoned his career in defiance, he would forfeit all his rights as a tutor in the public schools of Spain. The earnest remonstrances of his friends, joined to the promptings of his own reason, induced him to relinquish the design. His most powerful motive against precipitancy was that he had not the heart to break with the work of his whole life. He was the soul of the Escuela. He had become indispensable, alike to his fellow professors and to his pupils. Mathematics consoled him for all his trials, and to them he continued to consecrate himself with a loving fervour which even he had never surpassed. The mathematical treatises which he then began to send forth in rapid succession from the press will not be readily allowed to die by the scientific world of Spain.

Being about this time commissioned by the Spanish Government to study the works of tunnel making at Mont Cenis, and having no opportunity of doing so at leisure on his arrival, a very brief inspection sufficed for him to understand, or rather to guess, the whole of the internal mechanical arrangements of the perforators. And, thanks to this, and without bringing away with him sketches or plans of any sort, he, on his return to Spain, drew up a memorial with the most detailed description—a description subsequently proved accurate in all essential particulars—of the mechanism and procedure employed in the enterprise.

All this while there had been nothing in Echegaray’s tastes or performances that gave evidence of the poet, the dramatist, or even, in any distinct form, of the man of letters. His literary works, or rather such works of his as had even a suspicion of literary flavour about them, had been thus far confined to certain political orations, to articles on Political Economy, to publications on Mathematics, and to a humorous little sketch entitled, “The Comet, or a Carnival Joke,” which appeared in a Madrid newspaper. Echegaray’s partiality for the reading of novels and for the frequenting of theatres was the same. Still there was no awakening within him of any expressed ambition to write in emulation of those whose productions he admired as a spectator.

Towards the year 1864 it was that JosÉ’s brother Miguel, then a mere lad, wrote a little piece in one act and in verse entitled, “Cara o Cruz,” which was put on the stage, and was received in a friendly manner. And JosÉ, equally startled and amused at the spectacle of his boy brother writing smooth and harmonious verse, rapidly acquired the conviction that, after all, the writing of verses ought to have no stupendous difficulty about it. He did not long delay an experiment. He immediately set about putting together an appalling tragic argument, which he versified with tolerable ease. In this fashion was composed his first play. He kept it by him for a year. Having in the meanwhile dedicated himself with serious and characteristically energetic study to the whole question of dramatic writing, he drew the piece forth and read it a second time. He found it by no means equal to his first complacent judgment of its merits. He at once chose a safer hiding-place for it than previously, and it has never seen the light. Echegaray was becoming more and more immersed in these new subjects of interest, when an interruption came in the most notable public episode of his life. The revolution of 1868, and the flight of Isabella, launched him into the full tide of politics. His known ability naturally fitted him for the playing of a prominent part. He was very speedily selected for Cabinet rank in the newly-formed Government. He was created Minister for the Colonies. His new duties, entered upon and sustained with vigour and success, removed him for five years from the concerns of literature and the drama. Towards 1873, on the dissolution of the Permanent Commission of the Cortes, Echegaray’s name was proscribed. He was in imminent danger of death. He escaped to France. Eventually the ban was taken from his name, and his life was preserved, through the commanding influence of Emilio Castelar. This has been ever since gratefully acknowledged in a manner which does credit alike to the great orator and the great dramatist.

In the meantime, during his comparatively brief exile, Echegaray had written in Paris his drama, “El Libro Talonario.” It is the first of his pieces which was put on the stage, and the date of its production is February 18, 1874—not long after the author’s return to Spain. Nothing commonplace could come from Echegaray, yet neither in style nor in argument does the work give any revelation of the future greatness of the writer. Very little better was the reception accorded by the critics of Madrid to the second performance of the new poet, “La Esposa del Vengador,” also produced in 1874. There was not one, however, who failed to admit the numerous beauties of either play. The third effort, “La Ultima Noche,” again, was declared to be a chaotic conjunction of graces and monstrosities: as a work of genius unimpeachable; as a display of true dramatic quality, absurd.

On the other hand, the public of Madrid, roused to the highest pitch of interest in the new career marked out for himself by the celebrated mathematician, the ex-Cabinet Minister, the returned exile, had been receiving one after the other of his dramas with delight. This was not enough for a man of such iron will as Echegaray. He was deliberately bent on subduing his critics. His three first dramas had been experiments. He had been merely trying his hand.

On the 12th of October, 1875, was produced “En el puÑo de la Espada.” The play was welcomed with unanimous and boundless enthusiasm. The irregular and fiery genius, whose only enemy seemed to be his individual rashness, had stepped safely aside from down-rushing avalanches and gaping precipices, had scaled the heights reached by those few alone whose names will live, and was looking down in security and serenity alike on admiring critics and acclaiming public. From that night the severest judges of the Spanish capital recognised that there had come among them a dramatist of the first rank. Since that night Echegaray’s career has been one long triumphal march, his path strewn with flowers, his eyes rejoiced with the smiles of countless friends, his ears greeted with cries and songs of praise—and envy.

One of the most noted peculiarities in the onward course of Echegaray is the mixture of patient scorn and fierce energy with which he declines to look upon difficulties as insurmountable. Not merely in the solution of a hard problem in mathematics, or in clearing from his path the impediments which now make him rule the theatre of Spain as a monarch, does Echegaray show the force of his will. The rough term in which Ancient Pistol sums up the attributes of the Spaniard of Shakespeare’s time could not be more ludicrously applied than to such a man as JosÉ Echegaray.

In our country it is natural to conceive that we can pay no higher compliment to a man than by proclaiming him to be even as one of ourselves. Mr. Swinburne recognises—and with infallible justice—“a decisive note of the English spirit in MoliÈre,” as well as in Rabelais. In one way, at least, in the moral if not in the intellectual sense, in his resolution to ignore defeat, however incongruous be the task he may undertake, there appears to the observer of Echegaray’s career something strangely English. Two anecdotes may be given, alike as proofs of his almost boundless versatility, and of his constancy in breaking through seemingly impenetrable obstacles. On one occasion, he being in a drawing-room with several of his friends, among whom was a philosophical critic of some renown, the conversation fell upon German philosophy. Echegaray, who knew little of the matter discussed, and less of the German tongue, deemed it presumptuous to hazard an opinion for or against the thesis advanced, and maintained an absolute silence. Gradually, however, the debate resolved itself into a dispute as to the possibility of making an exhaustive study of a certain school of philosophy within a relatively short period. There can hardly be a more modest or amiable man than Echegaray, and yet the mere breathing of the word “impossibility” has been known at times to rouse him into an attitude of imperial defiance almost worthy of CÆsar or Napoleon. He left the house with the secret intention of proving that nothing is difficult to a man with clear brain and indomitable purpose. From that hour he devoted himself with patient zeal to no less a task than that of studying the special school of philosophy just argued about in the very fountains from which it emanated, in the original text of the German authors themselves. With such effect did he apply himself that, two months later, being in almost the same company, and the conversation—as the narrators will have it, with the usual emphatic pointing to coincidence—veering round to the same theme, the new student of philosophy displayed a depth of discernment, an acuteness of independent thought, a readiness of argumentative resource, a fertility of citation from the German language itself, which confounded the listeners; and apart from the congratulations on his new linguistic acquirement, there was an unanimous admission that Echegaray had expressed himself on the subject as a master in the midst of novices.

Another time he was in the company of friends who were engaged in a most exhaustive dissertation on the art of fencing. Innumerable were the experiences detailed in illustration of practice with the sabre, the sword, and the foil. Those who were least excited by the discussion turned now and then to Echegaray with a courteous explanation and a general air of respectful apology for treating of matters in which he could take no conceivable interest. Echegaray, in truth, had never held an offensive weapon in his hand. Next day, however, he appeared at the rooms of one of the best-known fencing masters of Madrid, enrolled his name as a pupil, and took his first lesson instantly. There are living eye-witnesses who tell how, three months afterwards, the grave mathematician, the coming lord of the Spanish drama, in a desperate encounter with foils, repeatedly hit, and at length actually disarmed his fencing master himself, amid the intense amazement and uproarious enthusiasm of bystanders, who counted among them some of the most expert fencers in the Spanish capital.

Echegaray’s very career as a dramatist might in a measure be described as a gigantic experiment in the art of vanquishing difficulties, an elaborate and prolonged tour-de-force. He was a spectator of his brother Miguel’s boyish and successful entrance into the domain of dramatic poetry. He saw nothing to prevent himself from following in the same path. His own prescription for writing verse is concise, and contains a justification of his new departure. He sums up the full requirements of a poet in “A little grammar, a little imagination, and a tolerable ear for music.” This is a matter-of-fact style of putting things which may seem rather like a ruthless tearing aside of the veil from a sanctuary that should never be revealed to profane eyes. The great unpublished poets whose own works are the result of the purest inspiration will resent it accordingly. Yet there is reason for suspicion that Shakespeare might have expressed himself on the dread mystery in some such light-hearted manner as Echegaray. The Spanish dramatist, however, omits one important condition which he, at least, has well fulfilled. He has all through life acted up to the letter of Carlyle’s teaching as to the “perennial nobleness and even sacredness” of “Work.” With him the main necessity in all the ways of life is hard labour, untiring drill, constant self-perfection. In his own example he seems to declare that even poets cannot straightway claim to be in the charmed circle of Mascarille’s “gens de qualitÉ” qui “savent tout sans avoir jamais rien appris.”

Perhaps one of the first things calculated to strike a student of Echegaray is the air of gloom which overhangs many of his graver dramas. Instances might be given in which a combination of nearly all the elements of woe and despair, frequently leads to a catastrophe, from the contemplation of which others besides the mere hysterical reader will find it difficult to turn away with calmness. Yet this writer may, in a certain sense, be said to have in him something of classic delicacy and reserve—with regard, in especial, to scenes of death. The introduction of death upon the stage seems invariably a matter of concern to him. Not that it is ever awkwardly shrunk from. Indeed, when used as a last resort, when “fear has had laid upon it as much as it can bear,” “when life is weaned and wearied till it is ready to drop,” then death in the hands of Echegaray comes forward at times with the weight of an almost overwhelming consummation. The Spanish dramatist, in short, may fairly claim a portion of that pleasing reverence for the dead which all true artists have. To adduce illustrations which must appear unfashionable in days when half a continent may be depopulated, without much protest, in the course of a single volume. The author of “Guy Mannering” and the author of “Monte Cristo,” in the very height of the gaiety, the gallantry, the majesty of their descriptions of their own and former times; Dickens and Thackeray, in the full flow of their mocking indignation or their lacerating irony, will be seen all at once to stop short. Their looks change. Their tones become softened and their eyes downcast. They uncover their heads and compel us to do the same. For they have led us into the presence of the dead; and before the lowliest or the loftiest of their fellows—Meg Merrilies or the AbbÉ Faria, Betty Higden or Colonel Newcome—these rare spirits incline themselves in solemn veneration.

Of Echegaray’s power over the pulses of sorrow and terror, without the intervention of death, an example may be found in “El Hijo de Don Juan.” And here, perhaps, a few words may not be out of place, even in view of Echegaray’s own “Prologue,” as to the true source of this drama. That it was inspired by the reading of Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” we have the Spaniard’s own declaration. But were it permissible to put aside the fact that both works treat of the problem of heredity in its most hideous and harrowing form, and the minor circumstance of the borrowing of Oswald’s phrase, “Mother, give me the sun!”—words which, to the mind of Echegaray, embody such picturesque and profound significance—Mr. William Archer himself might not be reluctant to admit the essential originality of the Spanish play. The truth is that “El Hijo de Don Juan” is a sombre and relentless satire upon the real national hero of Spain, the being immortalised by MoliÈre and Mozart, and more or less caricatured in the cruder imagination of JosÉ Zorilla. Don Juan, the gamester, the libertine, the duellist, the bully, has been transported from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. He is in entirely new surroundings and has become in a measure reformed. We find him past the sixtieth year of his age, with a wife whom he has indeed ill-treated, but with a son of whom he never tires of boasting. The disorders of his youth have left him with none the strongest of brains. And now the sins of the parent, in accordance with Echegaray’s unsparing rule, are visited upon the child. The father’s own mental weakness is developed in the most grim and terrible form in the gifted son. And so the flames in which Don Juan Tenorio was untimely plunged, are rekindled in the hell of misery and remorse with which the heir to his shameless renown sees the final overthrow of his boy’s intellect. It is hardly too much to say that the “Ghosts” is almost bright and frolicsome in comparison with the “Son of Don Juan.” Echegaray has here deliberately chosen colours of funereal blackness, and has laid them on with little regard for the feelings of the sensitive reader. Ibsen leads us to the edge of his own “Inferno,” and points to the pale faces of those whom his genius has condemned to immortal suffering; but he hurries us aside before we have time to become giddy. Echegaray drags us pitilessly down and holds us fast, while in our very presence his victims are whirled shrieking past us—borne along on burning winds, or stretched in agony on the rack. Still with all deductions, the gift of true impressiveness, which has been so abundantly acknowledged in Ibsen, will scarcely be denied to the Spaniard who so frankly admits the influence of the Northern master. This impressiveness may be set down to pathological causes, to the unwholesomeness of the subject, to the lugubrious moral atmosphere in which a pessimist like Ibsen, a teacher of Hebraic sternness like Echegaray, loves at times to fold himself round. But whether the effect of plays of this kind may or may not be illegitimate, it is, perhaps, within its peculiar limits, entirely unexampled. Plays of high name, plays filled with scenes of violence, with the ring and storm of battle, with midnight murder, with death in its worst forms, might be placed for comparison beside the “Son of Don Juan.” And though there is not a death, not a blow struck from beginning to end of the Spanish drama, such plays, with all their accumulations of misery and ferocity, might be found to yield in the element of sheer horror to the spectacle of the brilliant Lazarus, the poet, the dramatist, the coming glory of Spain, waking from a trance under the anguished eyes of his father, his mother, his betrothed, and bursting into the ravings of a hopeless madman.

Of Echegaray’s use of dramatic resources when he indeed brings death upon the stage, a few examples maybe quoted. In “El Gran Galeoto” the sudden exposure of the body of Julian to his unforgiven wife. In “Mariana” the bloody sacrifice of the heroine—in presence of her real lover—by the husband whom she loathes and defies. Lover and husband stand armed over the corpse; but the stage is not therefore converted into a shambles; we are merely left to conjecture that the two desperate men confronting each other will not long survive the woman who has coloured in such sinister fashion the lives of both. Another example, more openly verging on the melodramatic, may be encountered in an earlier drama than these, “En el seno de la Muerte.” Here is one of the rare instances in which Echegaray has chosen a purely romantic period for the scene of his play. A husband, treacherously wronged by the brother and the wife whom he had almost equally loved, contrives his revenge. He locks himself and the two culprits in the family mausoleum, of which he alone has the key and he alone knows the secret. He does not ignore, they do not ignore, the fact that there is no escape for any one of them. After a painful scene of reproach, at the end of which the traitor brother kills himself, the husband first throws the key which had locked them in, then the torch which had illumined the dismal magnificence of their surrounding’s, down a deep cavity which yawns between the monuments. Finally, in utter darkness, he stabs himself dead at his wife’s feet; and the curtain falls amidst an undefinable impression of haunting dismay at the alternatives of fate before the lonely survivor.

For obvious reasons Echegaray has been here referred to in connection with Ibsen. Whether an apology for such a conjunction of names might in reason be demanded by the most loyal of Ibsenites is doubtful, under the present conditions of criticism. It cannot but be a source of relief to any one helping to introduce a new author to the public, that the process of comparison has been simplified of late; that the qualifications exacted from competitors are drawn up in a spirit of charming leniency; that the certificate of immortality is made more than ever easy of attainment. Some years ago a writer thought fit, not only without seeming sense of shame, but with the complacent air of one who sees “a new planet swim into his ken,” to couple the names of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens. It must have been under the inspiration of such criticism as this that Shakespeare was immediately dethroned—for at least the hundredth time—and once again at the hands of “our lively neighbour the Gaul.” Corneille, Racine, and Victor Hugo were allowed to slumber tranquilly in their graves, and it was admitted on behalf of England—by the Paris Figaro—that the author of “Othello” was surpassed by M. Maurice Maeterlinck. Even under these encouraging circumstances, however, it will not be here contended that SeÑor Echegaray shows in his work anything comparable—“et oserai-je le dire,” as M. Mirbeau would say—“supÉrieure en beautÉ À ce qu’il y a de plus beau dans Shakespeare.” It might be suggested that “Mariana”—SeÑor Echegaray’s masterpiece in female creation—would have been readily accepted as a companion with Charmian and Iras in attendance on the most complex of all heroines—Cleopatra. Further than this it will not be safe to go.

Echegaray may be noted as displaying, even in the following mournful drama, a genuine and, as a rule, unforced sense of humour. In his comic passages, however, he has a fault which he shares with Shakespeare—and the editor of Punch. He is a remorseless punster.

This poet’s genius, as may have been remarked, burst into bloom at a time beyond the midsummer of life. He was forty-two before his first drama was produced. That is twenty-one years ago. Since then his activity has never known exhaustion. He is now the author of some fifty plays. There are particular years among the past twenty-one in the course of which he has put upon the stage as many as four dramas, not one of which is carelessly written, though one imitation from the German, “El Gladiador de Ravena,” was commenced and completed within three days. During these twenty-one years, indeed, he appears to have determined on making up for what, in other important respects, had certainly not been lost time. Civil engineers have found and still find it to their advantage to consult him on points which are the special study and occupation of their lives. He has published three formidable volumes on the “Modern Theories of Physics.” A well-known book of his has appeared on sub-marine vessels of war. He has lectured on Political Economy and Geology with equal success. He is admitted by Spaniards to be the chief of their own mathematicians; they further claim for him the honour of being one of the first mathematicians in the world. He is an orator who has won the applause of Castelar himself. There were only wanting his labours as a poet and a dramatist to set the seal upon a career of almost universal aptitude. Those labours have earned for him a renown which will assuredly not be allowed to die in his own country.

Be the praise high or low, in view of the condition of Spanish literature between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth, Spaniards declare that for more than two hundred years their drama has not brought forth a serious rival to this man. And there can hardly be a doubt that, in any selection of names of the greatest dramatists ever sprung from Spain, Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca will find the place nearest to themselves occupied by JosÉ Echegaray.