When anything serious happens to the heroine, she must at once take out her hair-pins, which are incompatible with sentiment.
The comic tenor can do nothing less than sing smart couplets to the young ladies, who learn them immediately and repeat them straight away.
Madrid Comico.
NOTES CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL.
[The accent, used in Spanish both for accentuation and pronunciation, has mostly only been given in the names of persons and places in which it is necessary for the pronunciation, as José, otherwise Jose.]
Alarcon, Pedro Antonio de, perhaps the most popular Spanish writer of the nineteenth century, was born in Guadix in 1833, and was a member of a noble family of but little means. After studying first jurisprudence, and afterwards theology, he devoted himself to letters, for which he had always shown a strong proclivity. Amongst the best known of his numerous works are “The Three-Cornered Hat,” which is based on an old Spanish tale, somewhat Boccaccian in flavour; “The Scandal”; “La Alpujarra,” the records of a delightful trip in Andalusia; and several collections of short tales, of which many have been translated into English—notably by Mary J. Serrano (New York).
Alas, Leopoldo, author and critic of the present day.
Aleman, Mateo, native of Seville, flourished in the year 1609. He followed in the steps of Mendoza, by the more ample portraiture of the life of a rogue than is the former’s Lazarillo, in his “Guzman de Alfarache,” which appeared in 1553, forty-six years after its prototype. Little is known of Aleman’s life; he seems to have been long employed in the Treasury, and at last to have retired, and devoted the rest of his life to letters. But he claims to be remembered by his work, “Guzmann de Alfarache,” the popularity of which was so immediate that, like “Don Quixote,” it provoked a spurious “Second Part” before the real continuation appeared, and was soon translated into the chief European tongues, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and even Latin, and into excellent English by Mabbe, whose contemporary, Ben Jonson, thus speaks of it: