“Gil Blas” is a romance by a Paris bookmaker. It owes its celebrity to an admirable sketch of a great minister, another of his successor, and an episode portraying Spanish manners. The Barber, Olivarez, the Count-Duke, the Barber, and the story of the adventurer himself, in his retirement, are all taken from the Spanish, and give to the work its value. It is then dressed up with Spanish peculiarities, and Madrid or Paris morals, and passes from hand to hand as a mirror of the Spanish mind. In reviewing the catalogue of recent works, I can point, as really influencing opinion or as referred to by travellers, only to Blanco White’s Letters, and the work out of which these remarks originated. Blanco White[44] is a man who, writing upon any foreign country, could not fail to perplex the judgment. How much more in respect to his own, when describing it to another, where he had made himself at home? In some parts, by keeping distinct the Englishman and the Spaniard, he has been able to translate the one to the other. Those parts are the domestic only. In all the rest he has jumbled the two characters, and has made the prejudices of the one override the simplicity of the other; falsifying the commonest facts, distorting the plainest conclusions. The effect is to puff up the Englishman and to degrade the Spaniard. To Mr. Ford’s book, however disagreeable the task, I had intended to devote a special chapter; but understanding that the two volumes are, in the second edition, reduced to one, I must infer that the author has anticipated my conclusion--that the work might be made valuable by cutting out the slang, ribaldry, opinions, and false quotations.