The subject, I think, is good. Spain is comparatively unknown. John Bull on his travels will not open to it. The British tourist in the Peninsula too often carries with him his native sense of superiority and his constitutional tendency to spleen. He turns up his nose at what he cannot, or will not, understand. If the beef is tough, he does not consider that it ought to be, most of the animals from whose ribs it came having done honest work as beasts of burden before they were driven to the slaughter-house. If the Val de Peñas is rasping to his palate, he ignores that the taste for wine, as for olives and Dublin stout and Glenlivat, is acquired. If the tobacco is coarse and weedy, he forgets that it is cheap, and that he can roll his cigarette and smoke it between the courses. But why does he not console himself for the absent by what is present--the ripe golden sun, the luscious fruits, the picturesque costumes, the high-bred dignity of the humblest beggar, the weird Æolian melody of sudden trills of song, the flashing eyes, mantilla-shaded, which speak romances in three volumes in every glance? The truth is, your Briton abroad, I mean the average one--not men like Mr. Gladstone in Sicily, or Captain Burton everywhere, Queen's Messengers and Special Correspondents, travelling Fellows of Oxford and pilgrims of art--your Briton of the tourist type is less inclined to adapt himself to another sphere than to try and assimilate that other to his own. This tourist goes to Spain; he hurries from end to end of the Peninsula, his guide-book in his hand and his opera-glass across his shoulder; he pays a flying visit to the Escurial, and pronounces it a gloomy crib; drops in on Seville, sees it, and does not marvel; mayhap he wanders as far as Granada, and finds it a dreary "sell;" and then he returns homeward, hot and tired and disappointed, and is eloquent on the rapacity of innkeepers, the profusion of counterfeit coin, the discomforts and unpunctuality of locomotion, the shocking uncleanliness--but, however, "you know, we got on better than the Joneses; we saw more sights and covered more country in fewer days." And this peripatetic postures for the rest of his life as an authority on Spain! The only point, perhaps, on which his judgment is to be accepted is one which he might have learned in London, namely, that Price's circus is not quite so good as Sanger's in Westminster or Hengler's off Oxford Street. Out upon the poor fool! _He_ know Spain! Why, that is more than I could dare to say, and I have had experience of it under Monarchy and Republic, in peace and in war; have mixed with Carlists in the field, and Intransigentes in the fortress; have traversed it from Irun to Gibraltar, from Santander to Malaga. He who has not been admitted into the intimacy of domestic life in Spain, who has not listened to habaneras by the camp-fire, joined in the jota on the village sward, shared in thorough sympathy in the sports of the arena