Spanish Life in Town and Country

after the outbreak of the war with America. To the other wonderful legends which gather round this romantic country, and are spread abroad, unabashed and uncontradicted, was a

, if there had been, they little know the innate courtesy of the Spanish people,

become more apparent, for, after a few days, or at most weeks, spent there, those who seem to imagine that they have discovered Spain, as Columbus discovered

industrial progress of the nation. Even in those days, however, too many tourists spent their time amongst the dead cities, remnants of Spain's great past, and came back to add their quota to the sentimental notions current about the romantic land sung by Byron. Wrapped in a glamou

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ke his own class associates at home. He, too, returns, shaking the dust off his feet, to draw a picture of the land he has left, as false and misleading as that of the dreamer who has overloaded his picture with colour that does not exist for the ordinary tourist. Thus it too often comes to pass that visitors to Spain experience keen disappointment during their short stay in the country. Whether they always acknowledge it or not, is another question. To hit the happy medium, and to draw from a tour in Spain, or from a more prolonged sojourn ther

s and of the Basque Provinces is very closely allied with that of Portugal. To judge the Biscayan by the same standard as the Andaluz, is as sensible as it would be to compare the Ir

the dreamy, pleasure-loving Andaluz; the vigorous Basque, whose distinctive language is not to be learned or understood by the people of any other part of Spain; the half-Moorish Valencian and the self-respecting Aragonese, who have always made their mark in the history of their country, and were looked upon as a foreign element in t

nt, and seemed to promise steadily increasing power and influence. Everyone knows that these dreams were never realised; that, so far from remaining the greatest nation of the Western World, Spain has gradually sunk back into a condition

ere is far less anger against America, which deprived Spain of her colonies, than against England, which looked on complacently, and with obvious sympathy for the aggressor. But all this is past, or passing. The Spaniards are a generous people, and no one forgets or forgives more easily or more entirely. Those who knew Madrid in the days of Isabel II., would not have imagined it possible that the Queen, who had been banished with so much general rejoicing, could, under any circumstances, have received in the capital a warm greeting; in fact, it was for long thought inexpedient to allow her to risk a popular

ided country that would give way. For the rest, so long as the monarch reigns constitutionally, and respects the rights and the desires of his people, there is absolutely nothing to fear from pretender or republican. At a recent political meeting in Madrid, for the first time, were seen democrats, republicans, and monarchists united; amidst a goodly quantity of somewhat "tall" talk, two notable remarks were received w

d to call the "legitimatist" cause, and announce its coming triumph in the Peninsula. No Spaniard takes the trouble to notice these remarkable productions of the fertile journalistic brain of a foreigner. There are still, of course, people calling themselves Carlists-notably the Duke of Madrid and Don Jaime, but the cult, such as

of all, Isabel la Católica, shows this. It was not until the time of Philip V., the first of the Bourbons, that this absolute monarch limited the succession to heirs male by "pragmatic

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rial. When, however, his son Ferdinand VII. was near his end, leaving only two daughters, he published his father's revocation o

l innovation, in defiance of the legitimate kings and of the Council of Castile, a fundamental law of the monarchy. Carlism, the party of the Church against the nation, came into existence when, during the first years of Cristina's Regency, Mendizábal, the patriotic merchant of Cadiz and London, then First Minister of

derstand why Carlism has been preached as a crusade to English Roman Catholics, who have been induced in both Carlist wars to

me of her national need, Don Carlos was unable to come forward in his celebrated character of "legitimate Sovereign of the Spanish people," or to raise even two or three voices in his favour, what chance is he likely to have with a settled constitutional Government and the really legitimate Monarch on the throne? The strongest chance he ever had of success was when the Basque Provinces were at one

the days of its first growth, and is now more important and more populous than Barcelona itself; with its charming outlet of Portugalete, it is the most flourishing of Spanish ports, and is able to compare with any in Europe for its commerce and its rapid growth. Viscaya and Asturias

high state of civilisation: some of the greatest Romans known to fame were Spaniards-Quintilian, Martial, Lucan, and the two Senecas. Trajan was the first Spaniard named Emperor, and the only one whose ashes were allowed to rest within the city walls; but the Spanish freedman of Augustus, Gaius Julius Hyginus, had been made the chief keeper of the Palatine Library, and Ballus, another

guage of Rome itself was altered by its Iberian emperors and literati; the races, in fact, amalgamated, and the Spaniard of to-day, to those who know him well, bears a strange resemblance to the Roman citizens with whom the letters of the Younger Pliny so charmingly make us familiar. The disme

of their occupation are singularly few: not a single inscription or book of Gothic origin remains, and it seems doubtful if any trace of the language can be

turians appear to be the representatives of the old inhabitants of Spain, who never settled down under the sway of the invader or acquiesced in foreign rule. Cicero mentions a Spanish tongue whi

nd disastrous, not to doubt whether in giving a new world "to Castile and Aragon," Cristobal Colon did not impose a burden on the country of his adoption which she was unable to bear, and which became, in the hands of the successors of her muy Espa?oles y muy Católicos kings, a curse instead of a blessing. Certain it is that Spain was not sufficiently advanced in political economy to understand or cope with the enormous changes which this opening up of a new world brought a

broken by Isabella and Ferdinand, and the device of adopting the Burgundian fashion of keeping at the Court an immense crowd of nobles in so-called "waiting" on the Monarch flattered the national vanity, while it ensured the absolute inefficacy of the class when it might have been useful in stemming the baneful absolutism of such lunatics as Felipe II. and the following Austrian monarchs, each becoming more

here unrusted in the fine air and sunshine of the country for over four hundred years, one's heart beats in sympathy with the pride of the Spaniards in their Catholic Kings.

sed to be Christians. It was not until the reign of Philip III. and his disgraceful favourite Lerma, himself the most bigoted of Valencian "Christians," that, by the advice of Ribera, the Archbishop of Valencia, these industrious, thrifty, and harmless people were ruthlessly driven out. They had turned Valencia into a prolific garden,-even to-day it is called the huerta

ity of a hundred souls were to remain to teach their modes of cultivation and their industries, and only three days were allowed for the carrying out of this most wicked and suicidal law. In the following six months one hundred and fifty thousand Moors were hounded out of the land which their ancestors had posses

t almost all their arts and industries; immense tracts of country became arid wastes: Castile and La Mancha barely raise crops every second year where the Moriscos reaped their teeming harvest, and Estremadura from a smiling garden became a waste where wandering flocks of sheep and pigs now find a bare subsistence. Nor was this all. Science and learning were also driven out with the Arab and Jew; Córdoba, like Toledo, vanished, as the centre of intellectual life. In pla

eligion absolutely free from fetish worship, and a standard of morality which has never been surpassed. But they ruthlessly destroyed it all, desecrated the temples where the sun was worshipped only as a visible representative of a God "of whom nothing c

covery of the country by the Spaniards, and established temples and schools there. No one who reads the minute accounts of the Incas from Garcilaso de la Vega-himself of the royal race on his mother's side, his father having been one of the Spanish adventurers-can avoid the conclusion that the religion of the Incas, thus utterly destroyed by the Spaniards, was muc

ll that was advancing in the nation; its writers, its singers, its men of science, wherever they dared to raise their voices in ever so faint a cry, ground down to one dead level of unthinking acquiescence, or driven forth from their native land, without ceasing to wonder at all at Spain's decadence from the moment she

religious or a political tyranny, it was at all times opposed to the very essence of freedom, and it was deliberately used, and would be again to-day if it were possible to restore it, to keep the people in a gross state of ignorance and superst

een the object of the Inquisition to darken reason wherever it had the power, and it left the mass of the Spanish people, great and generous as they are by nature, for long a mere mob of inert animals

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t all the evils he finds in the world of his own experience are the work of whoever happens to be the ruler for the time being; that it is possible for him to have any say in the matter never enters his head, and he vo

he may have nothing better than atheism and anarchism to fall back upon. The days of the absolute reign of ignorance and superstition are over; but the people are deeply religious. Will the Church of Spain ada

art favourite, until the climax was reached when Godoy, the disgraceful Minister of Charles IV., and the open lover of his Queen, sold the country to Napoleon. Then indeed awoke the great heart of the nation, and Spain has the everlasting glory of having risen as one man against the French despot, and, by the help of England, stopped his mad career. Even then, under

der his enlightened Minister, Florida Blanca. No phase of the public welfare was neglected: savings banks, hospitals, asylums, free schools, rose up on all sides; vagrancy and mendicancy were sternly repressed; while men of science and skilled craftsmen were brought from foreign countries, and it seemed as if Spain had fairly started on her upward course. But he died before his time in 1788, and was followed by a son and grandson, who, with their wives, ruled by base f