However that may be, the sad tunes of these Oriental ditties are still effective in spite of their antiquity; indeed certain sounds have a mysterious aptitude to express certain moods of the mind, in connexion with some unexplained sympathy between the sentient and intellectual organs, and the simplest are by far the most ancient. Ornate melody is a modern invention from Italy; and although, in lands of greater intercourse and fastidiousness, the conventional has ejected the national, fashion has not shamed or silenced the old airs of Spain--those “howlings of Tarshish.” Indeed, national tunes, like the songs of birds, are not taught in orchestras, but by mothers to their infant progeny in the cradling nest. As the Spaniard is warlike without being military, saltatory without being graceful, so he is musical without being harmonious; he is just the raw man material made by nature, and treats himself as he does the raw products of his soil, by leaving art and final development to the foreigner. [Sidenote: ENGLISH EXAMPLE.] The day that he becomes a scientific fiddler, or a capital cotton spinner, his charm will be at an end; long therefore may he turn a deaf ear to moralists and political economists, who cannot abide the guitar, who say that it has done more harm to Spain than hailstorms or drought, by fostering a prodigious idleness and love-making, whereby the land is cursed with a greater surplus of foundlings, than men of fortune; how indeed can these calamities be avoided, when the tempter hangs up this fatal instrument on a peg in every house? Our immelodious labourers and unsaltatory operatives are put forth by Manchester missionaries as an example of industry to the _Majos_ and _Manolas_ of Spain: “behold how they toil, twelve and fourteen hours every day;” yet these philanthropists should remember that from their having no other recreation beyond the public or dissenting-house, they pine when unemployed, because not knowing what to do with themselves when _idle_; this to most Spaniards is a foretaste of the bliss of heaven, while occupation, thought in England to be happiness, is the treadmill doom of the lost for ever. Nor can it be denied that the facility of junketing in the Peninsula, the grapes, guitars, songs, skippings and other incidents to fine climate, militate against that dogged, desperate, determined hard-working, by which our labourers beat the world hollow, fiddling and pirouetting being excepted. [Sidenote: PHILOSOPHY OF THE CIGAR.] CHAPTER XXIV. Manufacture of Cigars--Tobacco--Smuggling _viâ_ Gibraltar--Cigars of Ferdinand VII.--Making a Cigarrito--Zumalacarreguy and the Schoolmaster--Time and Money Wasted in Smoking--Postscript on Stock.