Murcia[3] has the credit of being the Bœotia of Spain. It has less than its share of Arab, and, perhaps, a considerable amount of Gothic, blood. Valencia has been unfavourably described; the physiognomy of its population being the most Moorish in Spain, and the temper dangerous. It was from Valencia that the last branch of Arabs was expelled in the reign of Philip III.--the Little Moors or Moriscoes. Orientals as they were, the nobles to whom they were serfs, and whose land they cultivated, could ill afford to lose them. Contrary to what we expect from their stock, they were signalized by steady industry and perseverance in agriculture. The present language of Valencia is only Spanish so far as it is spoken in the Spanish peninsula. It is a distinct tongue from the _Castilian_; yet not French. It belongs to the Provençal class--called also Limousin. It is the same with Catalonia; the least Iberic, the least Arab, but, perhaps, the most Roman, and the most Gothic of all the Spanish provinces--_Cat-alonia_ or _Goth-land_--commercial, manufacturing, and radical, with a political history of its own, and, for a time, an independent line of sovereigns--the Berengarii. In respect to language, the standard Spanish is that of the Castiles; and it is upon the Castilians that our usual notions of a Spaniard are founded. Decorous, reserved, and unenterprising, the occupant of a misplaced metropolis, and of an arid table-land, which, for the most part, is too much a mountain for agricultural, and too little of one for mining industry, he is a type of the third variety of the Iberic stock--the Andalusian and Catalonian being the other two. In the fourth, the mountaineer-character, with its usual spirit of independence, rude manners, and hardy mode of life, which attains its height in Navarre and Biscay, is shared in different degrees by the Galicians, Asturians, northern Arragonese, and the Spaniards of Leon; the physical appearance changing from dark to light, and from a regular contour to coarse angular features, with high cheek-bones. In Galicia, a province of hewers of wood and drawers of water, this is most remarkable. In Biscay, the comparative lightness of complexion has engendered the idea of a Norman intermixture.