There is rather less to reward your curiosity at the Palacio de las Dueñas, a vast mansion belonging to the Duke of Alba. Once it boasted eleven "patios," with nine fountains and one hundred columns of marble. A fine court, surrounded by a graceful arcade, remains. The staircase recalls that of the Casa de Pilatos. Our countryman Lord Holland stayed here a hundred years ago. He was a great admirer of Spanish literature at a time when it was hardly as much a matter of interest to foreigners as it is at present. Then there is the Casa de Bustos Tavera, where, according to Lope de Vega, Sancho the Brave used to visit the "Star of Seville"; and the Casa Olea, in the Calle Guzman el Bueno, with a hall of Mudejar workmanship dating from the days of Don Pedro. It is the romantic aspect of Seville that has impressed some visitors much more than its historical or archæological side. Over the poets and dramatists of the Romantic school the city exercised a strange fascination. Byron and Alfred de Musset found the atmosphere of the place most congenial. Through their rose-coloured spectacles every girl they met in these narrow white streets seemed "preternaturally pretty." The principal business of the inhabitants in the 'twenties and 'thirties of last century, to judge by the French poet's descriptions, was love-making, strumming the guitar, and duelling. That Spain was ever a romantic country in the vulgarly accepted sense of the term, I doubt. Roman Catholic customs and institutions forbid that free intermingling of the sexes from which result the thousand and one emotions, complications, situations, and catastrophes that are the ingredients of romance. In countries like Spain, where the canon law obtained, there could be, for instance, no runaway matches, no desperate flights in a post-chaise to a church (say) over the Portuguese border, with an irate father in pursuit. There could not have been, and cannot be at the present time, any walks with the beloved down the moonlit grove, any trysts by the stile or the ruined keep, any rendezvous among the rose-bushes. If a Spanish girl did any of these things, she would indeed, in French parlance, have thrown her cap over the mill. The affair would no longer have the complexion of a romance but of a sordid intrigue. This being so, I was delighted to hear that occasionally clandestine marriages are resorted to in Spain, and that fond lovers find a means of uniting in defiance of stern parents, even in Andalusia. The couple, accompanied by a few friends, contrive to sit next to each other in church, as far out of sight of the rest of the worshippers as possible. Their troths are plighted in an undertone just loud enough for the witnesses to hear, the ring slipped on under cover of the mantilla, and the hands joined at the precise moment the all-unconscious celebrant turns towards the congregation at the end of the mass and pronounces the benediction. In the eyes of the Church the two are married as