Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/152

 Puebla, slightly disguised. In "Calvary and Tabor," Riva Palacio treats of the career of the Army of the Centre in the same wars. Numbers of the characters therefore are persons actually living, to be met with every day, which gives to this fiction a singular effect.

Thus, in "El Sol de Mayo," Manuel Payno, Altamirano, and Riva Palacio himself are mentioned and their manners described in the debate on the financial measure which brought on the Intervention. Lerdo, long since an exile, resident in New York, was at that time "el profeta inspirada de nuestra nacionalidad" (the inspired prophet of our nationality). I pick out from the same book this paragraphic mention of our own civil war: "And Edmundo Lee shone like a star in the victories of Springfield and Bull Run." Perhaps the friends of General Robert E. Lee would have some difficulty in recognizing him under such a description.

These novels are printed with each sentence as a separate paragraph, for easier reading. They first began to rival somewhat the popular Fernandez y Gonzalez, by some called "the Spanish Dumas," whose works are printed in the journals, together with translations of those of Gaboriau and Dickens. Another flimsy series, in covers of green, white, and red, called "Episodios Nacionales" aim to sugar-coat a didactic exhibition of the events of the War of Independance. One individual after another tells a long, dreary narrative about what happened; these fall in with somebody else who tells more, and so it goes. These stories are read chiefly by the middle and lower classes, the upper class, as in most provincial states of society, preferring books from abroad. Their favorable reception may be accounted for in part by the lack of