no means devoid of poetry) is romantic, melodramatic, rushing along turbulently to the outcome in a death as violent as María's is peaceful. There is in each book a similar importance of the background. In Innocencia the "point of honor" is quite as strong and vindictive as in any play of the Spanish Golden Age. María shares with Innocencia relieving touches of humor and excellent pages of character description.
Taunay's O Encilhamento is a violent antithesis to the work just considered. Here the politician speaks. In passages of satire that becomes so acrimonious at times as to indicate real personages, the wave of speculation that swept Argentina and Brazil is analyzed and held up to scorn. The novel is really a piece of historical muck-raking and was long an object of resentment in the republic.
Everything from Taunay's pen reveals a close communion with nature, an intimate understanding of the psychology of the vast region's inhabitants. His shorter tales, which I hope later to present to the English-reading public, reveal these powers at their best. Now it is a soldier who goes to war, only, like a military Enoch Arden, to return and find his sweetheart in another's arms;
