When the earliest accounts of Spain begin, Salamanca was already a considerable place, and known by a name little different from what it bears at present. It fell to decay after the Moorish conquest, but was re-peopled at the same time with certain other towns upon the Tormes, by the Leonese in the 10th century, after the great battle of Simancas: in the 13th King St. Ferdinand removed thither the university from Palencia. It soon became one of the most flourishing seats of learning in Christendom, and continued to be so till Spain rejected the light of the reformation. In its best days it is said to have contained no fewer than 8,000 native students, and 7,000 from foreign countries: when the present war began, the number little exceeded 3,000, among whom a few Irish were the only foreigners. The population consisted of some 3,400 families: it had once been much greater. But Salamanca was still an important and a famous place: popular fiction had made its name familiar to those who are unacquainted with its history; while to the antiquary, the historian, and the philosopher, it is a city of no ordinary interest. The Roman road, which extended from thence to Merida, and so to Seville, may still be traced in its vicinity: its bridge of twenty-seven arches, over the Tormes, is said to be in part a Roman work. The Mozarabic liturgy is retained in one of its churches. Its cathedral, though far inferior to some of the older edifices, whether of Moorish or Gothic architecture, in Spain, is a large and imposing structure. Twenty-five parish churches are enclosed within its walls, twenty convents of monks or friars, eleven of nuns: these, with its numerous colleges, give it an imposing appearance from without, and a melancholy solemnity within. Nowhere, indeed, were there more munificent endowments for education, and for literature, and for religion; and nowhere could be less of that happy effect which the benefactors in their piety had contemplated: the philosophy which was taught there was that of the schoolmen, the morality that of the casuists, the religion that of the Inquisition. It is a popular belief in Spain, that the Devil also has his college at Salamanca, where students of the black art take their degrees in certain caverns, every seventh being left with him, in earnest of the after-payment to which they all are bound. ♦THE TORMES.♦