stage; his Impresiones y Recuerdos , in which the author describes and discusses the time when he smoked his first cigarette, the color of the eyes of his first sweetheart, the ferrule with which his teacher punished his boyish pranks, and other equally interesting matters, made on me the impression of an immense exhibition of personal vanity, in which the writer announced his res et gesta , with the gravity with which a Goncourt or a Daudet might make known what he had done in life.
Thus, then, his new book, Suprema Ley, surprised me agreeably, constituted a revelation,—of a truthfulness so admirable, so vivid, so passional, so full of that well-founded realism, which does not permit a book to remain on the shelf of the bookseller, but places it upon the table of the reader and in the memory of the lover of the beautiful.
If one did not see, at the close of the volume, the dates on which it was begun and concluded, he might believe that it had sprung forth complete, a spontaneous improvisation, a work