Antonio de Trueba

In 1835 he went to Madrid to learn business; but commerce was not to his taste, and, after a long apprenticeship, he turned to journalism,[1] hoping to make a livelihood by literary pursuits.

To earn his daily bread he discharged the duties of a clerk in a small commercial house, but all the while he beguiled his leisure and his moments of regret by writing little poems and tales redolent of the yearnings and sympathies of a Basque transplanted to the busy cosmopolitan center.

Won over to him by the charm of his writings, Queen Isabella II made him historiographer of the Biscayan district, and he held this post until her flight in 1868.

The pleasant simplicity and idyllic sentimentalism of these collections delighted an uncritical public, and de Trueba met the demand by supplying a series of stories conceived in the same ingenious vein.

[1] The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia considers de Trueba a second-rate writer, but praises the pastoral sentiments of his poetry.