There remains the difficulty of saying exactly what is the Spanish quality of the true _cosas de España_. Mr Ford, who knew the flavour well, gave it a name--the _borracha_--which, being interpreted, is the wine-skin, and the smack it lends to the juice of the grape. The Spaniards say that there are three natural perfumes, and the first of them is the smell of the dry earth after rain. The _borracha_, and the pungent scent of the “dura tellus Iberiæ” when wet, are not to everybody’s taste. Neither is their equivalent in literature, except where we find it purified and humanised by the genius of Cervantes. There has at all times been little love of beauty in the Spaniard, and not much faculty for ideal perfection of form. His greatest painting is realistic, the exact forcible rendering of the things seen with the eye of the flesh, selected, arranged, kept in their proper proportions in the picture, but rarely imagined. The things seen need not be the vulgar realities of life only. Velasquez is every whit as real in his presentment of the frigid dignity of the King, or in the “Lances,” as he is in the “Spinners” or the “Water-Seller.” Zurbaran’s friars are perfectly real, and their ecstatic devotion was also _chose vue_. It is the extent of his range of vision which gives Velasquez his solitary eminence among Spanish painters. Among their brother artists, the men of letters, there is the same faculty for seeing and reproducing the common life, though this must be understood to include that devotion to the Church which was far from being the least genuine thing in Spain. All did not see with the same breadth of vision. A Velasquez is rare. It is comparatively easy to be Zurbaran. As a rule the Spaniard could express types better than individuals. The jealous husband, the adventurer, heroic as in _Amadis_, or rascally as in _Lazarillo_, a rigid ideal of honour, an orthodox pattern of piety, are what the Spaniard gives us--these, and the stirring action of which they form a part. He drew from the world he saw around him, and fitted his materials into a pattern for the stage, or for the story. The _goût du terroir_, the essentially Spanish _borracha_, is on it all. The flavour is not delicate. There is little gaiety in the Spaniard, but instead of it a hard jocularity. He very rarely says the profound and universally true thing. It would be hard to make a collection of “beauties” from his literature. In so far as he has helped the general literature of the world, it has been by supplying a model of machinery for the play and the prose story. Therefore his literature stands apart in the modern world. If you are to enjoy it you must be prepared to be satisfied with the action, the ideal of honour, the enthusiastic piety which he can give. And to enjoy them you must read them in his own Castilian. All translation is as the back of the tapestry, but no original loses more than does the Spaniard when he is divested of his