Marianela. Translated from the Spanish of B. Perez Galdos by
Mary Wharton. (Digby, Long, and Co.)—The theme of Marianelot, by the Spanish writer Perez Galdos, is the faithful affection of a poor, uneducated orphan girl for a rich young man, born blind, who makes love to her under the impression that she is beautiful, until an oculist's well-nigh miraculous skill enables him to see, when the discovery that she does not correspond to his ideal produces a change in his sentiments which kills her. Notwithstanding some graceful and pathetic touches in the work, it does not seem to us so to develop the possibilities of such a theme as to do full justice to them ; but it is not very easy to judge the original fairly from a translation by a lady who has evidently thought more of literal exactitude than anything else, and has not attended sufficiently to the importance of recon- structing sentences translated from a foreign language in order to adapt them to English readers.
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