Some interesting pictures of Seville at the close of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries are to be found in the _Letters from Spain_, by D. Leucadio Doblado, written in 1824. Doblado is the pseudonym of Blanco White, son of the British Vice-Consul at Seville in those days. White was born in the city in 1775, brought up as a Spaniard, and sent to the University. His parents were very austere Catholics, but reading and study developed a sceptical tendency in young White's mind, and he subsequently came to England and was well-known in Unitarian circles. In his _Life_, Blanco White describes the quaint ceremony of entrance into the University of Seville. 'Every day of the week preceding the admission, the candidate was obliged to walk an hour in the principal quadrangle of the college, attended by one of the servitors, and his own servant or page--a needy student who, for the sake of board, lodgings and the cast-off clothes of his master, was glad in that humble capacity to go through the course of studies necessary for the profession--Divinity, Law or Medicine--which he intended to follow.' The custom of the _caravanas_ was a trying ordeal for the student. He was compelled to run the gauntlet of the gibes of a mob of spectators, as a trial of his patience. No physical violence was permitted, except when a candidate lost his temper. An irascible victim was speedily ducked in the basin of the fountain of the quadrangle. Ladies came to see the sport. When White passed through this ordeal, he was dressed in fantastic garments, and led by his tormentors by a rope.