Some of the larger buildings of Madrid are ambitious in design, but somehow they appear as flimsy as if the material used in their construction were pasteboard. The general aspect of the streets, compared with those of the old Spanish cities, with their massive and venerable buildings, is modern and paltry. There is none of that imposing magnificence which in some of the old provincial capitals seems to accord so perfectly with our conception of Spanish dignity and grandeur. There are twelve theatres, a splendid bull-ring, an enormous palace, the finest gallery of pictures in the world--for which the Spaniards are indebted to a great extent to Cromwell, who blindly sold them the fine collection which he appropriated from his king's effects after he had brought his plot for the judicial murder of Charles I. to a successful issue. In a long promenade called the Prado, the winds are ever blowing, but the flowers never; and although there are two melancholy rows of little trees, which in some measure remind one of those in a Noah's-ark, their attempts to reach anything like a decent growth, from a soil of hardened sand and stones, are singularly disheartening. Among other places provided for the amusement of the Madrileños, there is a casino, where they may play at the lucrative game of _trente-et-quarante_. Though the metropolis of the kingdom, there is no cathedral in Madrid. Some of the shops are very splendid; and to finish this rapid survey, I need scarcely mention that there is hardly a single mouth without a cigar in it, or a solitary spot that is not perfumed with the odour of tobacco smoke.