“She speaks both languages equally well, but is, I think, cleverer in Spanish, and gives it a softness of intonation which is almost unexampled here where the voices of the women are apt to be harsh and clattering like those of the Irish. Doesn’t Madame Daulnay say something of the kind? Nothing strikes me more than the rarity of agreeable voices, and (what I never noticed in any other country) one hears in the street the same tones as in the _salon_. I am for once inclined to admit an influence of climate. To jump from the physical to the moral, the Spaniards are the most provincial people conceivable, as much so as we were forty years ago. It is comfortable, for they think they have the best of everything--even of governments, for aught I know. But the everything must be Spanish. Even their actors they speak of in a way that would be extravagant even of Rachel, and I never saw worse. Perhaps the most oriental thing in this semi-oriental people is the hyperbole of praise which the critics allow themselves. It is quite beyond belief. The press, by the way, at least that of Madrid, is remarkably decorous, and never hints at private scandal. It may be because the duel is still a judicial ceremony--though hardly, for there is never any harm done. It may be that every one is conscious of a skylight in his own roof, through which a stone might come. On the whole, I think it is a relic of the old Spanish _hidalguia_, of which in certain ways I think there is a good deal left. But I don’t pretend to know the Spaniards yet--if ever I shall. When a man at sixty doesn’t yet know himself, he is apt to get startled and carried off by the readiness with which he hears shallow men pronounce judgment on a whole people. The only way to do this, I suppose, would be to read all history, to compare the action of different races or nations under similar circumstances (if circumstances ever are similar), and then, eliminating all points of likeness common to human nature, to analyze what was left, if anything should be left.”