par des trouvailles d'expression vraiment évocatrices et si, à la rigueur, on peut lui reprocher l'intrigue un peu feuilletonesque de son œuvre, on est tout heureux de reconnaître qu'elle est masquée, d'un bout à l'autre, par un art dans la composition, une fierté d'allure, une tenue de style qui font de La gloria de Don Ramiro un des meilleurs, sinon le meilleur des romans historiques écrits en castillan. H. PESEUX-RICHARD. Le Gérant: M.-A. DESBois. MACON, PROTAT FRÈRES, IMPRIMEURS. THE BEGINNINGS OF BYRONISM IN SPAIN Even I albeit I'm sure I did not know it, Nor sought of foolscap subjects to be king, Late in the summer of the year 1809, a young and melancholy English peer sailed regretfully away from the port of Gibraltar, after a hasty ride across the southern part of the Peninsula '. He had visited, in his brief gallop from port to port, Lisbon and its vicinity, Cadiz, Seville, Jerez, Gibraltar, and some intervening towns; and at the end of his all too brief sojourn in this "renowned, romantic land" he wrote to one of his friends at home: "I shall return to Spain before I see England, for I am enamoured of the country 2". Leaving Gibraltar in the Malta packet, the traveler went to the Near East, remained there until 1811, and then returned to England. In March, 1812, he dazzled the literary world by the publication of part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and from that moment he was the lion of society and the most conspicuous among British men of letters. Four years later the deplorable scandal connected with his separation from his wife drove him to the Continent, and at about the same time his verse began its invasion of literary Europe. But the Spanish Peninsula, which had so charmed the young poet, was not destined to be trod again by him in the 1. See P. H. Churchman, Lord Byron's Experiences in the Spanish Peninsula in 1809, in the Bulletin hispanique, January-March and April-June, 1909. 2. Letters and Journals, 1898-1901, I, 236. REVUE HISPANIQUE. XXIII. 23 |