more conservative feeling towards the Alhambra; but even their benefits are questionable; they “repair and beautify” on the church-warden principle, and there is no less danger in such “restorations” than in those fatal scourings of Murillo and Titian in the Madrid gallery, which are effacing the lines where beauty lingers. Even their tardy appreciation is somewhat interested: thus Mellado, in his late Guide, laments that there should be no account of the Alhambra, of which he speaks coldly, and suggests, as so many “English” visit it, that a descriptive work would be a _segura especulacion!_ a safe speculation! Thus the poetry of the Moorish Alhambra is coined into the Spanish prose of profitable shillings and sixpences. [Sidenote: FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT.] Travellers however should not forget, that much which to them has the ravishing, enticing charms of novelty, is viewed by the dull sated eye of the native, with familiarity which breeds contempt; they are weary, oh fatal lassitude! even of the beautiful: alas! exclaimed the hermit on Monserrat, to the stranger who was ravished by exquisite views, then and there beheld by him for the first and last time, “all this has no attraction for me; twenty and nine are the years that I have seen this unchanged scene, every sunrise, every noon, every sunset.” But _sordent domestica_, observes Pliny, nor are all things or persons honoured in their own homes as they ought to be, since the days that Mahomet the true prophet failed to persuade his wife and valet that his powers were supernatural. Can it be wondered that ruins and “old rubbish” should be held cheap among the Moro-Spaniards? or that their so-called “guides” should mislead and misdirect the stranger? It cannot well be avoided, since few of the writers ever travel in their own country, and fewer travel out of it; thus from their limited means of comparison, they cannot appreciate differences, nor tell what are the wants and wishes of a foreigner: accordingly, scenes, costumes, ruins, usages, ceremonies, &c., which they have known from childhood, are passed over without notice, although, from their passing newness to the stranger, they are exactly what he most desires to have pointed out and explained. Nay, the natives frequently despise or are ashamed of those very things, which most interest and charm the foreigner, for whose observation they select the modern rather than the old, offering especially their poor pale copies of Europe, in preference to their own rich, racy, and natural originals, doing this in nothing more than in the costume and dwellings of the lower classes, who happily are not yet afflicted with the disease of French polish: they indeed, when they dig up ancient coins, will rub off the precious rust of twice ten hundred years, in order to render them, as they imagine, more saleably attractive; but they fortunately spare themselves, insomuch that Charles III., on failing in one of his