“Nowhere in the world,” he writes, “could a spectacle have been presented which recalled so various, so far-reaching, and, in some respects, so sublime associations, yet rendered depressing by a sense of anachronism, of decay, and of that unreality which is all the sadder for being gorgeous. The Roman amphitheatre (_panem et circenses_), the united escutcheons from whose quartering dates the downfall of Saracenic civilization and dominion in Spain; the banners of Lepanto and of the Inquisition fading together into senile oblivion on the walls of the Atocha; the names and titles that recalled the conquest of western empires, or the long defeat whose heroism established the independence of the United Provinces, and proved that a confederacy of traders could be heroic; the stage-coaches, plumed horses, blazing liveries, and running footmen of Louis Quatorze; the partisans of Philip III.’s body-guard, the three-cornered hats, white breeches, and long black gaiters of a century ago, mingled pell-mell with the French shakos and red trousers of to-day; the gay or sombre costumes from every province of Spain, some recalling the Moor and some the motley mercenaries of Lope de Figueroa; the dense and mostly silent throng which lined for miles the avenue to the church, crowding the windows with white mantillas, fringing the eaves and ridge-poles, and clustered like swarming bees on every kind of open ground;--all these certainly touched the imagination, but, in my case at least, with a chill as of the dead man’s hand that played so large a part in earlier incantations to recall the buried or delay the inevitable. There was everything to remind one of the past; there was nothing to suggest the future. “And yet I am unjust. There were the young King and his bride radiant with spirit and hope, rehearsing the idyl which is charming alike to youth and age, and giving pledges, as I hope and believe, of more peaceful and prosperous years to come for a country which has had too much glory and too little good housekeeping. No one familiar with Spanish history, or who has even that superficial knowledge of her national character, which is all that a foreigner is capable of acquiring, can expect any sudden or immediate regeneration. The bent of ages is not to be straightened in a day by never so many liberal constitutions, nor by the pedantic application of theories drawn from foreign experience, the result of a wholly different past.