_Bocetos al temple_ was the first of Pereda’s books to attract the public, and it may be recommended to any one who wishes to judge the writer’s talent in its first phase. Pereda did greater things afterwards, but nothing more characteristic. It was always a source of weakness to his art that he had a didactic intention—an itch to prove that he is right, and that his opponents are wrong, often criminally wrong—and this tendency became more pronounced in some of his later books. Such novels as _El Buey suelto_, and the still more admirable _De tal palo, tal astilla_, have an individual interest of their own, but we are never allowed the privilege of forgetting that the one is a refutation of Balzac’s _Petites misères de la vie conjugale_, and the other a refutation of Pérez Galdós’s _Doña Perfecta_. To Pereda the problem seems perfectly simple. You have been discouraged from matrimony by Balzac, who has told you that the life of a married man is a canker of trials and disappointments—small, but so numerous that at last they amount to a tragedy, and so cumulative that the doomed creature feels himself a complete failure both as a husband and a father. Pereda seeks to encourage you by exhibiting the other side of the medal. Gedeón is a bachelor, a _buey suelto_: he has freedom, but it is the desolate freedom of the stray steer—or rather of the wild ass. He is worried to death by the nagging and quarrelling of his maid-servants; he gets rid of them, and is plundered by men-servants; he is miserable in a boarding-house, he is neglected in an hôtel; he has no family ties, is profoundly uncomfortable, goes from bad to worse, and finally expiates by marrying his mistress shortly before his death. The picture of well-to-do discomfort is powerful, but, as a refutation of Balzac, it is not convincing. So, again, in _De tal palo, tal astilla_. Fernando encounters the pious Águeda; his suit fails, he commits suicide, and she finds rest in religion, the only consoling agent. This is all far too simple. Are we to believe that every bachelor is a selfish dolt, or that only atheists commit suicide? Pereda, no doubt, lived to learn differently, but meanwhile his insistence on his own views had spoiled two works of art.