He was born at Santander. In 1871-1872 he studied under Manuel Milà i Fontanals at the University of Barcelona, then proceeded to the central University of Madrid. His academic successes was unprecedented; a special law was passed by the Cortes to enable him to become a professor at the age of twenty-two. Three years later he was elected a member of the Spanish Academy; but by this time he was well known throughout Spain.
His first volume, Estudios críticos sobre escritores montañeses (1876), had attracted little notice, and his scholarly Horacio en Español (1877) appealed only to students. He became famous, through his Ciencia española (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 even more noticeable in the Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880-1886), and the writer was hailed as the champion of the ultramontane party. His lectures (1881) on Calderón established his reputation as a literary critic; and his work as an historian of Spanish literature was continued in his Historia de las ideas estéticas en España (1881-1891), his edition (1890-1903) of Lope de Vega, his Antología de poetas líricos castellanos (1890-1906), and his Origenes de la novela (1905).
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