The morning after my arrival in Toledo, I rose early, anxious to see this ancient and truly Spanish city; and crossing the _Plaza Real_, which, at the early hour of six, resounded with the ringing of the blacksmith’s hammers, whose shops half monopolise the square, I followed the widest street that presented itself; and after a steep descent, I found myself at the eastern extremity of the town, and on the bridge over the Tagus. It is impossible to walk a step in Toledo, or to turn the eye in any direction, without perceiving the remains of former grandeur, and the proofs of present decay: ruins are every where seen,--some, the vestiges of empires past away, and whose remains are crumbling into nothingness,--the empires of Carthage and of Rome: other vestiges,--those of an empire equally fallen, but more visible, in the greater perfection of its monuments,--the Empire of the Moors: and still another class of ruins,--those more recent emblems that record the decay of the Spanish monarchy through the lapse of a hundred and fifty years. Past magnificence and present poverty are every where written in a hundred forms, and in legible characters. But all this, although offering to the reflecting mind an impressive example of the “sic transit gloria mundi,” gives to Toledo much of its peculiar interest in the eye of a stranger; and adds to the picturesque and striking character of the views presented from every quarter. Few of these are finer than the view of this remarkable city and its environs, from the bridge over the Tagus, where my morning walk conducted me.