He set to work systematically on Spanish with a cultivated Spaniard who could speak no English, and with whom he read and talked every day, besides turning French and English literature into Spanish. “I am working now at Spanish,” he writes, 2 August, 1878, “as I used to work at Old French--that is, all the time and with all my might. I mean to know it better than they do themselves--which isn’t saying much. Considering how hard it has always been for me to _speak_ a language--even one I knew pretty well--I am making good progress, for I did not begin till my return six weeks ago. Before that I hadn’t the spirit for it.” Of his tutor, Don Herminigildo Gines de los Rios, he adds: “He is a fine young fellow who lost a professor’s chair for his liberal principles, and is now professor in the Free University they are trying to found here. I like him very much.” Three months later he wrote: “I am beginning to talk Spanish pretty well, but my previous knowledge of the language is a great hindrance. This may seem a paradox, but it isn’t. What I mean is that I know too much to catch it by ear. I understand all that is said to me, and accordingly cannot (without a conscious effort) pay attention to the forms of speech. They go in at one ear and out at the other. But I can write it now with considerable ease and correctness. I am to be admitted to the Academy this month, I believe.” Lowell had been a year now at his post, and could venture to write of the internal politics of Spain with greater assurance because he had a more exact knowledge. His despatch to the government, No. 108, dated 26 August, 1878,[72] is a studied analysis of the character of the parties and leaders that composed the political situation. He begins by explaining his own reticence heretofore. “I have always been chary,” he writes, “of despatches concerning the domestic politics of Spain, because my experience has taught me that political prophets who make even an occasional hit, and that in their own country, where they may be presumed to know the character of the people, and the motives likely to influence them, are as rare as great discoverers in science. Such a conjunction of habitual observation with the faculty of instantaneous logic that suddenly precipitates the long accumulation of experience in crystals whose angles may be measured and their classification settled, can hardly be expected of an observer in a foreign country. Its history is no longer an altogether safe guide, for with the modern facility of intercommunication, influences from without continually grow more and more directly operative, and yet wherever, as in Spain, the people is almost wholly dumb, there are few means of judging how great the infiltration of new ideas may have been. Where there is no well-defined national consciousness with recognised organs of expression, there can be no public opinion, and therefore no way of divining what its attitude is likely to be under any given circumstances.”