Of deliberate design, I abstain from writing of the public buildings and monumental curiosities of Seville. All that can be had by those who choose in the exhaustive guide-books of Richard Ford and Henry O'Shea. To my thinking, nothing can be more insufferable than the statistics of architecture, the bald jargon of styles plateresque and ornaments charrigueresque, the raptures over chancels and transepts and ogee windows, the precise accounts of such a bell, which would turn the scale at so many hundredweight, and such a spire, which is three yards and a quarter taller than the York Column, with the everlasting scraps of poetry from the treasury of ready-made quotations interlarded between. It is worse even than the cant of criticism which Laurence Sterne castigated with honest pen. Hugo was a genius, and even Hugo was almost unequal to saving "Notre Dame de Paris" from the dead weight of architectural detail which cumbered its spirit. Let us look at Seville without the guide-book or guide, walk through its labyrinth of narrow paved streets with mind open to receive, and mark the features of the East side by side with those of the West. Those flat-roofed buildings with greeneries on the summit, those jealous balconies and windows with their iron trellis-work, those cool inner spaces with tesselated floors and surrounding of marble pillars of which we catch glimpses through the metal fret-work of the private doors--how Moorish they are! The sights and sounds, the ragged and bronzed beggar urchins, the hawkers of lemons and water, the strings of donkeys and mules in fringed blinkers pattering along under huge net or straw panniers, crammed with fruit, or charcoal, or tiles, or cork-wood--how characteristic, how utterly un-Frankish! That lolling clown, with legs dangling over the tawny sheared sides of a diminutive donkey, is a study in himself. Then the melodious street-cries, the lively braying and whinnying, and the perpetual tinkling of the collar-bells worn by all four-footed beasts that pass, except nobody's dog and the rich man's horse--what a pleasant concert they make!