k managed to stamp all the men and women
whose lives remotely touched his with the seal of his personality. Born
in Ronda in the wildest part of Andalusia of a family that came from
Velez-Malaga, a white town near the sea in the rich fringes of the
Sierra Nevada, he had the mental agility and the sceptical tolerance
and the uproarious good nature of the people of that region, the
sobriety and sinewiness of a mountaineer. His puritanism became a
definite part of the creed of the hopeful discontented generations that
are gradually, for better or for worse, remoulding Spain. His nostalgia
of the north, of fjords where fir trees hang over black tidal waters,
of blonde people cheerfully orderly in rectangular blue-tiled towns,
became the gospel of Europeanization, of wholesale destruction of all
that was individual, savage, African in the Spanish tradition. _Rebus
et factis._ And yet none of the things and acts do much to explain the
peculiar radiance of his memory, the jovial tenderness with which
people tell one about him. The immanence of the man is such that even
an outsider, one who like the milk boy at the funeral of Galdos meets
the procession accidentally with another errand in his head, is drawn
in almost without knowing it. It's impossible to think of him buried in
a box in unconsecrated ground in the Cementerio Civil. In Madrid, in
the little garden of the Institucion where he used to teach the
children, in front of a certain open fire in a certain house at El
Pardo where they say he loved to sit and talk, I used to half expect to
meet him, that some friend would take me to see him as they took people
to see Cid in San Pedro de Cardena.

Cara tiene de hermosura
muy hermosa y colorada;
los ojos igual abiertos
muy apuesta la su barba
Non parece que esta muerto
antes vivo semejaba.

II

Although Miguel de Unamuno was recently condemned to fifteen years'
imprisonment for _lese majeste_ for some remark made in an article
published in a Valencia paper, no attempt has been made either to make
him serve the term or to remove him from the chair of Greek at the
University of Salamanca. Which proves something about the efficiency of
the stand Giner de los Rios and his friends made fifty years before.
Furthermore, at the time of the revolutionary attempt of August, 1917,
the removal of Bestiero from his chair caused so many of the faculty to
resign and such universal protest that he was reinsta