with astonishment, and may perhaps afford some data by which we may judge of the improvement of which Spain might be susceptible under more favourable circumstances. CHAPTER III. MADRID. Streets and Street Population; Female Dress: the Mantilla, the Fan; aspect of the Streets of Madrid at different hours; the Siesta; Shops; good and bad Smells; State of the lower Orders; Analysis of the Population; Street Sketches; Sunday in Madrid; the Calle de Alcala; Convents; the Street of the Inquisition; private Apartments in Madrid; the Prado and its Attractions; ludicrous Incongruities; Spanish Women, and their Claims; the Fan and its uses; Portraits; inconvenient Exaction of Loyalty; the Philosophy of good walking; the Retiro; Castilian Skies; the Cafe Catalina and its Visitors; other Coffee Rooms, and Political Reflections; the Botanical Garden, strange Regulation on entering; the Theatres; Spanish Play Bills; Teatro del Principe; the Cazuela and Intrigue; Spanish Comedy; the Bolero; the Italian Company; cultivation of Music in Madrid; the Guitar; Vocal Music; Spanish Music. The traveller who arrives in Madrid from the north, has greatly the advantage over him who reaches the capital from any other point: every thing is newer to him. If one enter Spain at Cadiz, and travel through Seville and Cordova to Madrid, the edge of curiosity is blunted; much of the novelty of Spanish life is already exhausted; and Madrid possesses comparatively little to interest: but travelling to the capital, through Castile, one arrives in Madrid almost as unlearned in the modes of Spanish life, as if the journey had been performed by sea; nor is the interest with which the traveller afterwards sees Cordova and Seville greatly diminished, by having previously seen Madrid. For, although the aspect of a Spanish town, and the modes of Spanish life are then familiar to him,--Cordova, and Seville, and the other cities of the south, possess an exclusive interest, in the remains of the Moorish empire,--in the peculiarity of the natural productions around them--in the climate, which exercises an important influence upon the habits of the people,--and in the taint of Moorish usages, visible in all those provinces which continued the longest time under the dominion of the Moors. With curiosity therefore on the tiptoe, to see the capital of Spain, and the Spaniards in their capital, I hastened into the streets.