The wines of Spain deserve a chapter to themselves. Sherry indeed is not less popular among us than Murillo, in spite of the numbers of bad copies of the one, which are passed off for undoubted originals, and butts of the other, which are sold neat as imported. The Spaniard himself is neither curious in port, nor particular in Madeira; he prefers quantity to quality, and loves flavour much less than he hates trouble; a cellar in a private house, of rare fine or foreign wines, is perhaps a greater curiosity than a library of ditto books; an hidalgo with twenty names simply sends out before his frugal meal for a quart of wine to the nearest shop, as a small burgess does in the City for a pint of porter. Local in every thing, the Spaniard takes the goods that the gods provide him, just as they come to hand; he drinks the wine that grows in the nearest vineyards, and if there are none, then regales himself with the water from the least distant spring. It is so in everything; he adds the smallest possible exertion of his own to the bounties of nature; his object is to obtain the largest produce for the smallest labour; he allows a life-conferring sun and a fertile soil to create for him the raw material, which he exports, being perfectly contented that the foreigner should return it to him when recreated by art and industry; thus his wool, barilla, hides, and cork-bark, are imported by him back again in the form of cloth, glass, leather, and bungs. [Sidenote: WINES OF SPAIN.] The most celebrated and perfect wines of the Peninsula are port and sherry, which owe their excellence to foreign, not to native skill, the principal growers and makers being Europeans, and their system altogether un-Spanish; nothing can be more rude, antique, and unscientific, than the wine-making in those localities where no stranger has ever settled. But Spain is a land bottled up for antiquarians, and it must be confessed that the national process is very picturesque and classical; no Ariadne revel of Titian is more glittering or animated, no bas-relief more classical in which sacrifices are celebrated “To Bacchus, who first from out the purple grape Crushed the sweet poison of misused wine.”