the dowager's husband--for his Grace of Rianzares follows the fashion, and has a paper at his beck, (partly for his assistance in those stock exchange transactions whose pursuit has more than once dilapidated his wife's savings,)--papers of this stamp, we say, carefully disguise or distort all facts whose honest revelation would be unpleasant or discreditable to their employers. From the garbled and imperfect statements of these journals, which few Frenchmen, and scarcely any Englishmen, ever see, the "Madrid correspondents" of French and English newspapers--not a few of whom reside in Paris or London--compile their letters, and editors derive their data (for want of better sources) when discussing the condition and prospects of Spain. Hence spring misapprehension and delusion. Spain is declared to be prosperous and happy; and Spanish bondholders flatter themselves, for the hundredth time, with, the hope of a satisfactory arrangement--to which their great patience certainly entitles them, and which they might as certainly obtain were the ill-administered revenues of Spain so directed as to flow into the public coffers, and not into the bottomless pockets of a few illustrious swindlers, and of the legion of corrupt underlings who prop a system founded on immorality and fraud. The system is rotten to the core, and the prosperity of Spain is a phantom and a fallacy. Not that she is deficient in the elements of prosperity: on the contrary, the country has abundant vitality and resource, and its revenue has been for years increasing, in the teeth of misgovernment, and of a prohibitive tariff, which renders the customs' revenue almost nominal. But it matters little how many millions are collected, if they be intercepted on their way to the exchequer, or squandered and misappropriated as soon as gathered in.