As rivers in a state of nature are somewhat scarce in Great Britain, one more extract may be perhaps pardoned, and the more as it tends to illustrate Spanish character, and explain _las cosas de España_, or the things of Spain, which it is the object of these humble pages to accomplish. The Tagus rises in that extraordinary jumble of mountains, full of fossil bones, botany, and trout, that rise between Cuenca and Teruel, and which being all but unknown, clamour loudly for the disciples of Isaac Walton and Dr. Buckland. It disembogues into the sea at Lisbon, having flowed 375 miles in Spain, of which nature destined it to be the aorta. The Toledan chroniclers derive the name from Tagus, fifth king of Iberia, but Bochart traces it to _Dag_, Dagon, a fish, as besides being considered auriferous, the ancients pronounced it to be piscatory. Not that the present Spaniards trouble their head more about the fishes here than if they were crocodiles. Grains of gold are indeed found, but barely enough to support a poet, by amphibious paupers, called _artesilleros_ from their baskets, in which they collect the sand, which is passed through a sieve. [Sidenote: NAVIGATION OF THE TAGUS.] The Tagus might easily be made navigable to the sea, and then with the Xarama connect Madrid and Lisbon, and facilitate importation of colonial produce, and exportation of wine and grain. Such an act would confer more benefits upon Spain than ten thousand _charters_ or paper constitutions, guaranteed by the sword of Narvaez, or the word and honour of Louis-Philippe. The performance has been contemplated by many _foreigners_, the Toledans looking lazily on; thus in 1581, Antonelli, a Neapolitan, and Juanelo Turriano, a Milanese, suggested the scheme to Philip II., then master of Portugal; but money was wanting--the old story--for his revenues were wasted in relic-removing and in building the useless Escorial, and nothing was made except water parties, and odes to the “wise and great king” who _was_ to perform the deed, to the tune of Macbeth’s witches, “_I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do_,” for here the future is preferred to the present tense. The project dozed until 1641, when two other _foreigners_, Julio Martelli and Luigi Carduchi, in vain roused Philip IV. from his siesta, who soon after losing Portugal itself, forthwith forgot the Tagus. Another century glided away, when in 1755 Richard Wall, an Irishman, took the thing up; but Charles III., busy in waging French wars against England, wanted cash. The Tagus has ever since, as it roared over its rocky bed, like an unbroken barb, laughed at the Toledan who dreamily angles for impossibilities on the bank, invoking Brunel, Hercules, and Rothschild, instead of putting his own shoulder to the water-wheel. In 1808 the scheme was revived: Fro Xavier de Cabanas, who had studied in England our system of canals, published a survey of the whole river; this folio ‘_Memoria sobre la