There is a great deal of exaggeration in the descriptions given by those who enjoy the sport. The horses selected for the sacrifice are miserable jades, that are fit for nothing else but to be killed, and the bulls are rarely so fierce as to be dangerous, unless goaded or provoked into phrensy by the tricks of the combatants. The men who go into the fight are all hired butchers or fighters, who are paid regular salaries, like actors in a theatre, and they make a business of it. And so universal is the rage of the people to see this, the national sport and pastime, that the ring must furnish seats for ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand people, and the price of admission for such a multitude readily supplies the means to meet the great expenses of the entertainment. One of the most curious facts developed by the bull-fight is the fondness that women have for such scenes. It is no fiction that ladies, whose refinement cannot be called in question, are in raptures when the fight is the most savage and bloody. It always was so. In the amphitheatres of Italy, when martyr Christians were compelled to fight with wild beasts, the fairest and proudest of women were among the spectators, who looked on with delight when their fellow-creatures were torn limb from limb. I have often heard it said, here and elsewhere, that women are more fond of these bloody spectacles than men are. We know they are more sympathetic with suffering, and in the hospital and chamber of sickness and anguish, they minister with a long-suffering patience and fortitude from which the sterner stuff that men are supposed to be made of revolts at once, or soon shrinks worn out, “used up,” as we say. What is the effect of these scenes of blood and butchery on the national character? In the streets the boys play bull-fight: one holds up a red handkerchief and shakes it in the face of another boy, who makes a lunge at him with his head, and then pursues him, and another sets off after _him_, and so the bull-ring is enacted in the highway. As all the large towns have bull-rings, and the poorest classes of people manage to get money enough to see the show, and the country boy can give his girl no greater treat than to take her to a bull-fight, the thing is in the widest sense national, and its influence reaches down to the lowest ranks, while it is the pet of the nobility and gentry. And its effect must be degrading, brutifying, and demoralizing. If there were any thing in the Spanish character to work upon, for good or evil, the influence of such a decided national pastime would be more distinctly pronounced. But the senseless _pride_ of the Spaniard,—pride with nothing to be proud of; pride with idleness, ignorance, and poverty; pride of the meanest and most contemptible sort,—is the warp and woof of Spanish character, and there is hardly any thing more in them than there would be in a nation of peacocks.