laudable attempts to improve and modernise them, compared his loving subjects to naughty children, who quarrel with their good nurse when she wants to wash them. [Sidenote: WANT OF INFORMATION.] Again, no country in the world can vie with Spain, where the dry climate at least is conservative, with memorials of auld lang syne, with tower and turret, Prout-like houses and toppling balconies, so old that they seem only not to fall into the torrents and ravines over which they hang. Here is every form and colour of picturesque poverty; vines clamber up the irregularities, while below naiads dabble, washing their red and yellow garments in the all-gilding glorious sun-beams. What a picture it is to all but the native, who sees none of the wonders of lights and shadows, reflections, colours, and outlines; who, blind to all the beauties, is keenly awake only to the degradation, the rags and decay; he half suspects that your sketch and admiration of a smuggler or bullfighter is an insult, and that you are taking it, in order to show in England what Mons. Guizot will never be forgiven for calling the “brutal” things of Spain; accordingly, while you are sincerely and with reason delighted with sashes and _Zamarras_, he begs you to observe his ridiculous Boulevard-cut coat: or when you sit down opposite to a half-ruined Roman wall, some crumbling Moorish arch, or mediæval Gothic shrine, he implores you to come away and draw the last spick and span Royal Academical abortion, coldly correct and classically dull, in order to carry home a sample which may do credit to Spain, as approximating to the way things are managed at Charing Cross. Without implicitly following the advice of these Spaniards of better intention than taste, no man of research will undervalue any assistance by which his objects are promoted, even should he be armed with a captain-general’s passport, and a red Murray. Meagre is the oral information which is to be obtained from Spaniards on the spot; these incurious semi-Orientals look with jealousy on the foreigner, and either fence with him in their answers, raise difficulties, or, being highly imaginative, magnify or diminish everything as best suits their own views and suspicions. The national expressions “_Quien sabe? no se sabe_,”--“who knows? I do not know,” will often be the prelude to “_No se puede_,”--“it can’t be done.” [Sidenote: DIFFICULTIES OF SIGHT-SEEING.]