These have furnished themes for national plays and poems, or have been celebrated in those all-pervading ballads which are as the life-breath of the people, and thus have continued to exercise an influence on the national character which centuries of vicissitude and decline have not been able to destroy; so that, with all their faults, and they are many, the Spaniards, even at the present day, are on many points the most high-minded and proud-spirited people of Europe. It is true, the romance of feeling derived from the sources I have mentioned, has, like all other romance, its affectations and extremes. It renders the Spaniard at times pompous and grandiloquent; prone to carry the "pundonor," or point of honor, beyond the bounds of sober sense and sound morality; disposed, in the midst of poverty, to affect the "grande caballero," and to look down with sovereign disdain upon "arts mechanical," and all the gainful pursuits of plebeian life; but this very inflation of spirit, while it fills his brain with vapors, lifts him above a thousand meannesses; and though it often keeps him in indigence, ever protects him from vulgarity. In the present day, when popular literature is running into the low levels of life and luxuriating on the vices and follies of mankind, and when the universal pursuit of gain is trampling down the early growth of poetic feeling and wearing out the verdure of the soul, I question whether it would not be of service for the reader occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier modes of thinking, and to steep himself to the very lips in old Spanish romance. For my own part, I have a shelf or two of venerable, parchment-bound tomes, picked up here and there about the peninsula, and filled with chronicles, plays, and ballads, about Moors and Christians, which I keep by me as mental tonics, in the same way that a provident housewife has her cupboard of cordials. Whenever I find my mind brought below par by the commonplace of every-day life, or jarred by the sordid collisions of the world, or put out of tune by the shrewd selfishness of modern utilitarianism, I resort to these venerable tomes, as did the worthy hero of La Mancha to his books of chivalry, and refresh and tone up my spirit by a deep draught of their contents. They have some such effect upon me as Falstaff ascribes to a good Sherris sack, "warming the blood and filling the brain with fiery and delectable shapes." I here subjoin, Mr. Editor, a small specimen of the cordials I have mentioned, just drawn from my Spanish cupboard, which I recommend to your palate. If you find it to your taste, you may pass it on to your readers. Your correspondent and well-wisher, GEOFFREY CRAYON. * * * * * LEGEND OF DON MUNIO SANCHO DE HINOJOSA. BY THE AUTHOR OF THE SKETCH-BOOK.