exclusive use of a people,—but a Balzac none the less."
Despite his lack of ideas, his mixture of archaisms, nelogisms, his exuberance, his slow development of plots, his lack of proportion (noticeable, naturally, in his longer works rather than in his short fiction) he stands pre-eminent as a patron of the nation's intellectual youth and as the romancer of its opulent imagination.
Medeiros e Albuquerque (1867–) is considered by some critics to be the leading exponent in the country of "the manner of de Maupassant, enveloped by an indefinable atmosphere that seems to bring back Edgar Allan Poe." He has been director-general of public instruction in Rio de Janeiro, professor at the Normal School and the National School of Fine Arts, and also a deputy from Pernambuco. With the surprising versatility of so many South Americans he has achieved a reputation as poet, novelist, dramatist, publicist, journalist and philosopher.
IV.
The part that women have played in the progress of the South American republics is as interesting as it is little known. The name of the world's largest river—the Amazon, or
