or less piratical or illegitimate, all bearded like the pard, and be-ribboned like maypoles, and all eager once more to rush to the fray, and signalise themselves under a foreign banner. These are specimens of the adventurer bellicose, the Mike Lambournes and Dugald Dalgettys of the nineteenth century. Of a more calculating and ambitious class is the adventurer speculative, who possesses a Dousterswivel aptitude for discovering mines, devising railways, projecting canals, and the like undertakings. Spain has of late been favoured with the attentions of many of these gentlemen, flying at every thing, from a common sewer to a coal mine, an omnibus company to a hundred leagues of railway. With geniuses of this stamp have originated some of the impracticable projects so eagerly caught at by English capitalists, whose unemployed cash had mounted, as Mr. Ford expresses it, from their pockets to their heads. We know not who was the projector of that most magnificent scheme to connect Madrid with the Atlantic, in defiance of such trifling impediments as the Guadarama range and the Asturian Alps, but we learn from the "Gatherings" that he was "to receive L40,000 for the cession of his plan to the company, and actually did receive L25,000, which, considering the difficulties, natural and otherwise, must be considered an inadequate remuneration." Unfortunately, when he sold his plan, he did not show the buyers how to surmount the difficulties; and indeed he would have been puzzled to do so, since they subsequently proved insurmountable. But the whole of the facts relating to Spanish railroads lie in a nutshell, and may be set forth in ten lines. Neither by the nature of its surface, nor by amount of population and importance of trade, is Spain adapted to receive this greatest invention of the present century. As to a regular system of railways, diverging from Madrid to the frontiers and principal seaport towns, on the plan laid down for France, it is not to be thought of, and can never be accomplished. And with respect to those lines which _might_ be made along the valleys, and by following the course of rivers, the country is not yet ripe for them. Spain has not yet been able to get canals; her highroads, worthy of the name, are few and far between, leading only from the capital to coast or frontier, whilst cross roads and communications between towns are for the most part mere _caminos de herradura_, horse-shoe or bridle roads of a wretched description. A few short lines of cheap construction over level tracts, and favoured by peculiar circumstances, such as a populous district, the proximity of large towns, or of a country unusually rich in natural productions, are the only railways that can as yet be undertaken in Spain without certainty of heavy loss. The line between Madrid and Aranjuez is the only one, Mr. Ford thinks, at all likely to be at present carried out.