Explore "Youth and Egolatry" by Pio Baroja on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I have never been able to feel any enthusiasm for Spanish politicians. We hear a great deal about Canovas. Canovas has always impressed me as being as bad an orator as he was a writer. When I first read his _Bell of Huesca_, I could not contain myself for laughing. As far as his speeches are concerned, I have also read a few, and find them horribly heavy, diffuse, monotonous and deficient in style. I hear that Canovas is a great historian, but if so, I am not acquainted with that side of him.
Castelar was unquestionably a man of exceptional gifts as a writer, but he failed to take advantage of them, and they were utterly dissipated. He lacked what most Spaniards of the 19th Century lacked with him; that is, reserve.