Segovia, Antonio Maria, who signed his articles with the pseudonym “The Student,” has the fame of being the most classic in style of the Spanish periodical essayists of the nineteenth century.
Selgas y Carrasco, José, was born in Murcia in 1824, and died at Madrid, 1882. He was one of the contributors to the famous periodical El Padre Cobos, and exhibits an inimitable serious humour in his volumes of “Loose Leaves” (“Hojas Sueltas”).
Timoneda, Juan de, a bookseller, one of the founders of the popular theatre in Spain, flourished in the year 1590. He was also an early writer of Spanish tales, his first attempt being “Patrañuelo,” a small work which drew its material from widely different sources—some being found in the Gesta Romanorum, others, like the story of Griselda, from Boccaccio, another, familiar to English readers by the ballad of “King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,” probably from Sacchetti. Timoneda was a friend of Lope de Rueda, whose works he edited.
Trueba, Antonio de, born Christmas, 1819 (?), of poor and respectable parents, within the jurisdiction of the province of Biscay, was sent, at the age of fifteen, to work in a hardware store in Madrid, where he spent all his spare time and hours, stolen from sleep, in reading and writing, until he began to publish, and finally dedicated himself wholly to literature. He is the exponent of humble Spanish life, especially of the country people, and if he is somewhat too rose-coloured in his views, it is, perhaps, not an unpardonable fault. His collection of popular songs was received with enthusiasm, and though he is now out of vogue as an author, the songs and his prose works, of which most are based upon folk-tales, will always be of value for the researches of Folk-lore.
Valera, Juan, was born in the province of Cordova on October 18, 1824. He had aristocratic connections, and was early in life enrolled in the diplomatic service, to which he owes his great familiarity with European literature. He subsequently entered politics, and until the age of forty-two had been able to give up to authorship but his hours of leisure, to which we owe his critical studies and translations. “Pepita Jiménez,” his first novel, was produced in 1874, and was a “success unparalleled in the history of modern Spanish literature.” To continue in the words of Mr. Edmund Gosse:—“This book still remains, after the large development of fiction in Spain, the principal, the typical Spanish novel of our days.... It has become a classic in the lifetime of its author, and is studied, imitated, analysed as a book which has passed beyond all danger of the vicissitudes of fashion, and which will unquestionably survive as one of the glories of the national literature.... ‘Pepita Jiménez’ is Spain itself in a microcosm—Spain with its fervour, its sensual piety, its rhetoric and hyperbole, its superficial passion, its mysticism, its graceful extravagance.” Later novels are “El Comendador Mendoza,” “Doña Luz,” and “Doctor Faustino.” Valera occupies a pre-eminent position as politician, journalist, author, and critic, and is at present at Vienna as Spanish ambassador to the Austrian Court.
Vicente, Gil, a Portuguese, but who ranks among Spanish dramatists, as he wrote ten plays in Castilian. (It was a not uncommon practice for Portuguese authors to employ Castilian. Saa de Miranda, the pastoral poet and contemporary of Gil Vicente, wrote six of his eight eclogues in the more sonorous Castilian.) Gil Vicente flourished as a writer for the stage from 1506 to 1536; died in 1557.
Yriarte (Iriarte), Tomas de, born on the island of Tenerife in 1750, but educated mostly at Madrid, owes his reputation chiefly to his literary fables, the influence of which was much needed in the age of bad writing in which they appeared, and in which he showed originality by adapting the attributes of animals to only one class of men, namely, authors, and not mankind at large, as had always been done before. Yriarte died in 1791.
Zayas y Sotomayor, Maria de. The only information we can gather respecting this lady is founded on the authority of the industrious bibliographer, Nicolas Antonio, who assures us that she was a native of Madrid, and that she composed two series of novels, under the titles of “Novelas Amorosas i exemplares,” and “Novelas i Seraos.” She is also mentioned by Lope de Vega in his “Laurel de Apolo” in very flattering terms. The style and character of this write novels exhibit much of the ease and elegance, with no little of the freedom, of Boccaccio; they abound with incident, both humorous and tragic, and with chivalric or amorous adventure. With little artifice, however, in the plot, and less study of character, there are some striking and effective scenes; while the situations are often well conceived, and the suspense is maintained throughout so as to please or surprise us. “The Miser Chastised” is perhaps the only one of her novels in which the writer wholly adopts a comic tone and spirit, without any touches of a more sentimental kind. With some humour, this story combines considerable ease and originality. Under the same title as the foregoing appeared a drama from the pen of Don Juan de la Hoz Mota, a Spanish dramatic writer of some celebrity, who succeeded in exposing the vice of avarice on the stage in strong and natural colours, and with such bold and happy strokes of ridicule, as almost to merit its being placed in the same rank with the famous “Avare” of Molière (Thomas Roscoe). Doña Maria de Zayas, flourished in the year 1637. Zorrilla, José, born at Valladolid, February 21, 1817, poet par excellence of traditionary and legendary subjects, has for years been prime favourite of the Spanish people, and his inexhaustible vein of poetry showed but scanty signs of diminishing even in the last years of a hoary old age. His most popular work, “Don Juan Tenorio” (1844), a drama in verse treating of the notorious Don Juan, hero of Tirso de Molina’s “Seville Deceiver,” of Byron’s poem, and Mozart’s opera, is a masterpiece of harmonious and flowing verse, and of fine dramatic effect. It is played annually in every town where there is a theatre throughout all Spain on the eve of All Saints’ Day, when the scene in which the bodies rise from their graves and come to the banquet of Don Juan and his boon companions upon the former’s blasphemous invitation is awaited with breathless horror by crowded houses. Other long poems are the “Legend of the Cid,” and “The Cobbler and the King.” Zorrilla died the 23rd of January, 1893.
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