MARCELINO MENENDEZ Y PELAYO (1856- )  ,

Spanish scholar and critic, was born at Santander on the 3rd of November 1856 . In 1871-1872 he studied under Mil& y Fontanals at the university of Barcelona, whence he proceeded to the central university of Madrid . His academic successes had never been surpassed; a special law was passed by the Cortes to enable him to become a professor at the age of twenty-two, and three years later he was elected a member of the Spanish Academy . But before this date (1882) he was well known throughout Spain . His first volume, Estudios criticos sobre escritores montaneses (1876), had attracted little notice, and his scholarly Horacio en Espana (1877) appealed only to students . He became famous through his Ciencia espanola (1878), a collection of polemical essays defending the national tradition against the attacks of political and religious reformers . The unbending orthodoxy of this work is, if possible, still more pronounced in the Historia de los heterodoxos espanoles (188o-1886), and the writer was hailed as the champion of the ultramontane party . His lectures (1881) on Calderon established his reputation as a literary critic; and his work as an historian of Spanish literature was continued in his Historia de las ideas esteticas en Espana (1881-1891), his edition (1890-1903) of Lope de Vega, his Antologla de poetas liricos casteilanos (1890-1906), and his Origenes de la novela (1905) .