Of the many misrepresentations regarding Spain, few are more inveterate than those which refer to the dangers and difficulties that are there supposed to beset the traveller. This, the most romantic, racy, and peculiar country of Europe, may in reality be visited by sea and land, and throughout its length and breadth, with ease and safety, as all who have ever been there well know, the nonsense with which Cockney critics who never have been there scare delicate writers in albums and lady-bird tourists, to the contrary notwithstanding: the steamers are regular, the mails and diligences excellent, the roads decent, and the mules sure-footed; nay, latterly, the _posadas_, or inns, have been so increased, and the robbers so decreased, that some ingenuity must be evinced in getting either starved or robbed. Those, however, who are dying for new excitements, or who wish to make a picture or chapter, in short, to get up an adventure for the home-market, may manage by a great exhibition of imprudence, chattering, and a holding out luring baits, to gratify their hankering, although it would save some time, trouble, and expense to try the experiment much nearer home. As our readers live in an island, we will commence with the sea and steamers. [Sidenote: STEAMERS.] The Peninsular and Oriental Navigation Company depart regularly three times a month from Southampton for Gibraltar. They often arrive at Corunna in seventy hours, from whence a mail starts directly to Madrid, which it reaches in three days and a half. The vessels are excellent sea-boats, are manned by English sailors, and propelled by English machinery. The passage to Vigo has been made in less than three days, and the voyage to Cadiz--touching at Lisbon included--seldom exceeds six. The change of climate, scenery, men, and manners effected by this week’s trip, is indeed remarkable. Quitting the British Channel we soon enter the “sleepless Bay of Biscay,” where the stormy petrel is at home, and where the gigantic swell of the Atlantic is first checked by Spain’s iron-bound coast, the mountain break-water of Europe. Here _The Ocean_ will be seen in all its vast majesty and solitude: grand in the tempest-lashed storm, grand in the calm, when spread out as a mirror; and never more impressive than at night, when the stars of heaven, free from earth-born mists, sparkle like diamonds over those “who go down to the sea in ships, and behold the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.” The land has disappeared, and man feels alike his weakness and his strength; a thin plank separates him from another world; yet he has laid his hand upon the billow, and mastered the ocean; he has made it the highway of commerce, and the binding link of nations.