Another favourite drink is a weak bottled beer mixed with iced lemonade. Spaniards, however, are no great drinkers of beer, notwithstanding that their ancestors drank more of it than wine, which was not then either so plentiful or universal as at the present; this substitute of grapeless countries passed from the Egyptians and Carthaginians into Spain, where it was excellent, and kept well. The vinous Roman soldiers derided the beer-drinking Iberians, just as the French did the English _before_ the battle of Agincourt. “Can sodden water--barley-broth--decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat?” Polybius sneers at the magnificence of a Spanish king, because his home was furnished with silver and gold vases full of beer, of barley-wine. The genuine Goths, as happens everywhere to this day, were great swillers of ale and beer, heady and stupifying mixtures, according to Aristotle. Their archbishop, St. Isidore, distinguished between _celia ceria_, the ale, and _cerbisia_, beer, whence the present word _cerbeza_ is derived. Spanish beer, like many other Spanish matters, has now become small. Strong English beer is rare and dear; among one of the infinite ingenious absurdities of Spanish customs’ law, English beer in barrels used to be prohibited, as were English bottles if empty--but prohibited beer, in prohibited bottles, was admissible, on the principle that two fiscal negatives made an exchequer affirmative. [Sidenote: WINES OF SPAIN.] CHAPTER XIII. Spanish Wines--Spanish Indifference--Wine-making--Vins du Pays--Local Wines--Benicarló--Valdepeñas.