and in the rites of religion, dipped into the peasant's olla podrida, nay, even watched the flushed gamblers over their cards, with the eager-eyed baratero standing by--he does not know Spain. All this have I done, and more; and yet I am but on the threshold of acquaintance with that great and beautiful home of paradox, that land of valour and courtesy, of fidelity and magnanimity, of piety and patriotism; and, in a lesser degree, of the vices which are opposed to these good qualities. No country of Europe so near to us is so little known. Yet in none is the soil fertilized by so much British blood. But this was in the bygone; and the yearly increasing swell of journeying-against-time tourists has not swept in tidal wave over the Peninsula. Even Spanish plays--and Spain can boast of one of the richest springs of dramatic literature in Europe--are comparatively sacred from the desecrating touch of the ruck of contemporary English stage adulterators. Spain is not known; and yet it is not for the lack of word-painters to make it familiar in pen-and-ink pictures. There is Ford, most learned and graphic of guides, as full of irresistible prejudice as he is of impulsive affection. There is Borrow, that robust, quaint, and captivating, if sometimes over-fanciful, cicerone, albeit his errand to Spain was as indiscreet in purpose as it was bootless in result. There is Sala, of memory richly stored--whom I freely salute as past-master in his craft--most charming, observant, and illustrative of roving journalists. Ford, Borrow, Sala, all know Spain and "things Spanish" by personal experience; but it is plain that too many of the latter-day critics of Spain and the Spaniards are of the class who are ready to write social novels on Chinese life with no more knowledge of the Flowery Land than is to be obtained under the dome of the Reading-room of the British Museum. The pity of it is that this second-hand evidence is too often taken on trust, while the truthful records of eye-witnesses are shoved into a dusty corner of the cupboard. It is so nice to be patted on the head and rubbed down with the grain, to be reminded that we are what we always thought ourselves to be--the perfect, the registered A 1 people of the universe, the people who set the pattern, the people who are righteous, moral, honest, tolerant, charitable, and modest; who wage no unjust wars; who have no Divorce Court scandals; who know not bank frauds; who never persecuted Highlanders, or Jews, or Irishmen; who permit no misappropriations of money left to the poor; who make no brag over small victories against badly-armed savages. But stay, this is taking me to Africa, not Spain; and Africa does not begin at the other side of the Pyrenees, the epigram of Dumas to the contrary notwithstanding. My great object is to coax the English reader to be reasonable, and not to take the dimensions of the round world by the parochial yard-measure, nor to gauge the Coliseum by the standard of Clapham.