Señor Agüeros, of course, railed against a dilettante movement which has spread from France and Spain throughout the whole of Latin-America, and is not confined to Mexico alone. Such young men as he describes are met with in every European country, so that his fears for the national literature were scarcely well founded. But it is true that the Mexican youth is prone to extravagance (or what the Englishman would regard as extravagance) in literary as in amatory affairs. His ancestry and environment render it difficult for him to be otherwise. In later life, however, he sobers down; his precocity is disciplined by experience; and in his turn he lectures the gilded youth of a later generation upon the heinous-character of literary make-believe.
Another writer who pleads for a Mexican literature and the treatment of purely Mexican themes is Victoriano Salado Albarez, who has set his face uncompromisingly Albarez. against the weak imitations of French decadent writings. In his De mi cosecha (From My Harvest) he attacks Mexican literary decadence, and pleads for a sane and sound national literature. He has gathered together anecdotes of the national history from the time of Santa Anna to that of the modern reforms in his Santa Anna a la Reforma, and this is perhaps his most notable literary endeavour. La Intervencion y el Imperio (The Intervention and the Empire) treats the time of Maximilian in the same manner. The first part of this work is entitled " The Frogs Begging for a King," from which Senor Albarez's attitude towards his countrymen's behaviour during the Maximilian period can readily be construed.
Luis Gonzalez Obregon, one of Mexico's most charming writers, is best known by his Mexico Viejo (Old Mexico), a delightful collection of two series of essays Obregon. on isolated episodes in ancient Mexican history, legends, old customs, and biographical matter, nearly all of which are drawn from unpublished manuscripts or scarce and precious works. Obregon revels in the
