Chapter 2

The strangers, who had looked somewhat blank at the first appearance of our figure, no sooner heard us address them in this manner than they uttered a simultaneous 'Ola!' and, springing up, advanced towards us with countenances irradiated with smiles. They were three in number, to say nothing of a tall loutish fellow with something of the look of a domestic, who stood at some distance. All three were evidently gentlemen--one was a lad about twenty, the other might be some ten years older--but the one who stood between the two, and who immediately confronted us, was evidently the principal. He might be about forty, and was tall and rather thin; his hair was of the darkest brown; his face strongly marked and exceedingly expressive; his nose was fine, so was his forehead, and his eyes sparkled like diamonds beneath a pair of bushy brows slightly grizzled. He had one disagreeable feature--his mouth--which was wide and sensual-looking to a high degree. He was dressed with elegance--his brown surtout was faultless; shirt of the finest Holland, frill to correspond, and fine ruby pin. In a very delicate and white hand he held a delicate white handkerchief perfumed with the best atar-de-nuar of Abderrahman. 'What can we oblige you in, cavalier?' said we, as we looked him in the face: and then he took our hand, our brown hand, into his delicate white one, and whispered something into our ear--whereupon, turning round to the steward, we whispered something into his ear. 'I know nothing about it,' said the steward in a surly tone--we have nothing of the kind on board--no such article or packet is come; and I tell you what, I don't half like these fellows; I believe them to be custom-house spies: it was the custom-house barge they came in, so tell them in Moors to get about their business.' 'The man is a barbarian, sir,' said we to the cavalier; 'but what you expected is certainly not come.' A deep shade of melancholy came over the countenance of the cavalier: he looked us wistfully in the face, and sighed; then, turning to his companions, he said, 'We are disappointed, but there is no remedy--Vamos, amigos.' Then, making us a low bow, he left the cabin, followed by his friends. The boat was ready, and the cavalier was about to descend the side of the vessel--we had also come on deck--suddenly our eyes met. 'Pardon a stranger, cavalier, if he takes the liberty of asking your illustrious name.' 'General Cordova,' said the cavalier in an under voice. We made our lowest bow, pressed our hand to our heart--he did the same, and in another minute was on his way to the shore. 'Do you know who that was?' said we to the steward--'that was the great General Cordova.' 'Cordova, Cordova,' said the steward. 'Well, I really believe I have something for that name. A general do you say? What a fool I have been--I suppose you couldn't call him back?' The next moment we were at the ship's side shouting. The boat had by this time nearly reached the Caesodrea, though, had it reached Cintra--but stay, Cintra is six leagues from Lisbon--and, moreover, no boat unless carried can reach Cintra. Twice did we lift up our voice. At the second shout the boat rested on its oars; and when we added 'Caballeros, vengan ustedes atras,' its head was turned round in a jiffy, and back it came bounding over the waters with twice its former rapidity. We are again in the cabin; the three Spaniards, the domestic, ourselves, and the steward; the latter stands with his back against the door, for the purpose of keeping out intruders. There is a small chest on the table, on which all eyes are fixed; and now, at a sign from Cordova, the domestic advances, in his hand a chisel, which he inserts beneath the lid of the chest, exerting all the strength of his wrist--the lid flies open, and discloses some hundreds of genuine Havannah cigars. 'What obligations am I not under to you!' said Cordova, again taking us by the hand, 'the very sight of them gives me new life; long have I been expecting them. A trusty friend at Gibraltar promised to send them, but they have tarried many weeks: but now to dispose of this treasure.' In a moment he and his friends were busily employed in filling their pockets. Yes Cordova, the renowned general, and the two secretaries of a certain legation at Lisbon--for such were his two friends--are stowing away the Havannah cigars with all the eagerness of contrabandistas. 'Rascal,' said Cordova, suddenly turning to his domestic with a furious air and regular Spanish grimace, 'you are doing nothing; why don't you take more?' 'I can't hold any more, your worship,' replied the latter in a piteous tone. 'My pockets are already full; and see how full I am here,' he continued, pointing to his bosom. 'Peace, bribon,' said his master; 'if your bosom is full, fill your hat, and put it on your head. We owe you more than we can express,' said he, turning round and addressing us in the blandest tones. 'But why all this mystery?' we demanded. 'O, tobacco is a royal monopoly here, you know, so we are obliged to be cautious.' 'But you came in the custom-house barge?' 'Yes, the superintendent of the customs lent it to us in order that we might be put to as little inconvenience as possible. Between ourselves, he knows all about it; he is only solicitous to avoid any scandal. Really these Portuguese have some slight tincture of gentility in them, though they are neither Castilian nor English,' he continued, making us another low bow. On taking his departure the general gave the steward an ounce of gold, and having embraced us and kissed us on the cheek, said, 'In a few weeks I shall be in England, pray come and see me there.' This we promised faithfully to do, but never had the opportunity; he went on shore with his cigars, gave a champagne supper to his friends, and the next morning was a corpse. What a puff of smoke is the breath of man!

But here before us is a Hand-book for Spain. From what we have written above it will have been seen that we are not altogether unacquainted with the country; indeed we plead guilty to having performed the grand tour of Spain more than once; but why do we say guilty--it is scarcely a thing to be ashamed of; the country is a magnificent one, and the people are a highly curious people, and we are by no means sorry that we have made the acquaintance of either. Detestation of the public policy of Spain, and a hearty abhorrence of its state creed, we consider by no means incompatible with a warm admiration for the natural beauties of the country, and even a zest for Spanish life and manners. We love a ride in Spain, and the company to be found in a Spanish venta; but the Lord preserve us from the politics of Spain, and from having anything to do with the Spaniards in any graver matters than interchanging cigars and compliments, meetings upon the road (peaceable ones of course), kissing and embracing (see above). Whosoever wishes to enjoy Spain or the Spaniards, let him go as a private individual, the humbler in appearance the better: let him call every beggar Cavalier, every Don a Senor Conde; praise the water of the place in which he happens to be as the best of all water; and wherever he goes he will meet with attention and sympathy. 'The strange Cavalier is evidently the child of honourable fathers, although, poor man, he appears to be, like myself, unfortunate'--will be the ejaculation of many a proud _tatterdemalion_ who has been refused charity with formal politeness--whereas should the stranger chuck him contemptuously an ounce of gold, he may be pretty sure that he has bought his undying hatred both in this world and the next.

Here we have a Hand-book for Spain--we mean for travellers in Spain--and of course for English travellers. The various hand-books which our friend Mr. Murray has published at different times are very well known, and their merit generally recognized. We cannot say that we have made use of any of them ourselves, yet in the course of our peregrinations we have frequently heard travellers speak in terms of high encomium of their general truth and exactness, and of the immense mass of information which they contain. There is one class of people, however, who are by no means disposed to look upon these publications with a favourable eye--we mean certain gentry generally known by the name of _valets de place_, for whom we confess we entertain no particular affection, believing them upon the whole to be about the most worthless, heartless, and greedy set of miscreants to be found upon the whole wide continent of Europe. These gentry, we have reason to know, look with a by no means favourable eye upon these far-famed publications of Albemarle-street. 'They steal away our honest bread,' said one of them to us the other day at Venice, '_I Signori forestieri_ find no farther necessity for us since they have appeared; we are thinking of petitioning the government in order that they may be prohibited as heretical and republican. Were it not for these accursed books I should now have the advantage of waiting upon those _forestieri_'--and he pointed to a fat English squire, who with a blooming daughter under each arm, was proceeding across the piazza to St. Marco with no other guide than a 'Murray,' which he held in his hand. High, however, as was the opinion which we had formed of these Hand-books from what we had heard concerning them, we were utterly unprepared for such a treat as has been afforded us by the perusal of the one which now lies before us--the Hand-book for Spain.

It is evidently the production of a highly-gifted and accomplished man of infinite cleverness, considerable learning, and who is moreover thoroughly acquainted with the subject of which he treats. That he knows Spain as completely as he knows the lines upon the palm of his hand, is a fact which cannot fail of forcing itself upon the conviction of any person who shall merely glance over the pages; yet this is a book not to be glanced over, for we defy any one to take it up without being seized with an irresistible inclination to peruse it from the beginning to the end--so flowing and captivating is the style, and so singular and various are the objects and events here treated of. We have here a perfect panorama of Spain, to accomplish which we believe to have been the aim and intention of the author; and gigantic as the conception was, it is but doing him justice to say that in our opinion he has fully worked it out. But what iron application was required for the task--what years of enormous labour must have been spent in carrying it into effect even after the necessary materials had been collected--and then the collecting of the materials themselves--what strange ideas of difficulty and danger arise in our minds at the sole mention of that most important point! But here is the work before us; the splendid result of the toil, travel, genius, and learning of one man, and that man an Englishman. The above is no overstrained panegyric; we refer our readers to the work itself, and then fearlessly abandon the matter to their decision. We have here all Spain before us; mountain, plain, and river, _poblado y desploblado_--the well known and the mysterious--Barcelona and Batuecas.

Amidst all the delight and wonder which we have felt, we confess that we have been troubled by an impertinent thought of which we could not divest ourselves. We could not help thinking that the author, generous enough as he has been to the public, has been rather unjust to himself--by publishing the result of his labours under the present title. A Hand-book is a Hand-book after all, a very useful thing, but still--The fact is that we live in an age of humbug, in which every thing to obtain much note and reputation must depend less upon its own intrinsic merits than on the name it bears. The present work is about one of the best books ever written upon Spain; but we are afraid that it will never be estimated at its proper value; for after all a Hand-book is a Hand-book. Permit us, your Ladyship, to introduce to you the learned, talented, and imaginative author of the--shocking! Her Ladyship would faint, and would never again admit ourselves and our friends to her _soirees_. What a pity that this delightful book does not bear a more romantic sounding title--'Wanderings in Spain,' for example; or yet better, 'The Wonders of the Peninsula.'

But are we not ourselves doing our author injustice? Aye surely; the man who could write a book of the character of the one which we have at present under notice, is above all such paltry considerations, so we may keep our pity for ourselves. If it please him to cast his book upon the waters in the present shape, what have we to do but to be grateful?--we forgot for a moment with what description of man we have to do. This is no vain empty coxcomb; he cannot but be aware that he has accomplished a great task; but such paltry considerations as those to which we have alluded above are not for him but for writers of a widely different stamp with whom we have nothing to do.

WHAT TO OBSERVE IN SPAIN.

Before we proceed to point out the objects best worth seeing in the Peninsula, many of which are to be seen there only, it may be as well to mention what is _not_ to be seen: there is no such loss of time as finding this out oneself, after weary chace and wasted hour. Those who expect to find well-garnished arsenals, libraries, restaurants, charitable or literary institutions, canals, railroads, tunnels, suspension-bridges, steam-engines, omnibuses, manufactories, polytechnic galleries, pale-ale breweries, and similar appliances and appurtenances of a high state of political, social, and commercial civilisation, had better stay at home. In Spain there are no turnpike-trust meetings, no quarter-sessions, no courts of _justice_, according to the real meaning of that word, no treadmills, no boards of guardians, no chairmen, directors, masters-extraordinary of the court of chancery, no assistant poor-law commissioners. There are no anti-tobacco-teetotal-temperance meetings, no auxiliary missionary propagating societies, nothing in the blanket and lying-in asylum line, nothing, in short, worth a revising barrister of three years' standing's notice. Spain is no country for the political economist, beyond affording an example of the decline of the wealth of nations, and offering a wide topic on errors to be avoided, as well as for experimental theories, plans of reform and amelioration. In Spain, Nature reigns; she has there lavished her utmost prodigality of soil and climate which a bad government has for the last three centuries been endeavouring to counteract. _El cielo y suelo es bueno_, _el entresuelo malo_, and man, the occupier of the Peninsula _entresol_, uses, or rather abuses, with incurious apathy the goods with which the gods have provided him. Spain is a _terra incognita_ to naturalists, geologists, and every branch of ists and ologists. The material is as superabundant as native labourers and operatives are deficient. All these interesting branches of inquiry, healthful and agreeable, as being out-of-door pursuits, and bringing the amateur in close contact with nature, offer to embryo authors, who are ambitious to _book something new_, a more worthy subject than the _decies repetita_ descriptions of bull-fights and the natural history of ollas and ventas. Those who aspire to the romantic, the poetical, the sentimental, the artistical, the antiquarian, the classical, in short, to any of the sublime and beautiful lines, will find both in the past and present state of Spain subjects enough, in wandering with lead-pencil and note-book through this singular country, which hovers between Europe and Africa, between civilisation and barbarism; this is the land of the green valley and barren mountain, of the boundless plain and the broken sierra, now of Elysian gardens of the vine, the olive, the orange, and the aloe, then of trackless, vast, silent, uncultivated wastes, the heritage of the wild bee. Here we fly from the dull uniformity, the polished monotony of Europe, to the racy freshness of an original, unchanged country, where antiquity treads on the heels of to-day, where Paganism disputes the very altar with Christianity, where indulgence and luxury contend with privation and poverty, where a want of all that is generous or merciful is blended with the most devoted heroic virtues, where the most cold-blooded cruelty is linked with the fiery passions of Africa, where ignorance and erudition stand in violent and striking contrast.

Here let the antiquarian pore over the stirring memorials of many thousand years, the vestiges of Phoenician enterprise, of Roman magnificence, of Moorish elegance, in that storehouse of ancient customs, that repository of all elsewhere long forgotten and passed by; here let him gaze upon those classical monuments, unequalled almost in Greece or Italy, and on those fairy Aladdin palaces, the creatures of Oriental gorgeousness and imagination, with which Spain alone can enchant the dull European; here let the man of feeling dwell on the poetry of her envy-disarming decay, fallen from her high estate, the dignity of a dethroned monarch, borne with unrepining self-respect, the last consolation of the innately noble, which no adversity can take away; here let the lover of art feed his eyes with the mighty masterpieces of Italian art, when Raphael and Titian strove to decorate the palaces of Charles, the great emperor of the age of Leo X., or with the living nature of Velazquez and Murillo, whose paintings are truly to be seen in Spain alone; here let the artist sketch the lowly mosque of the Moor, the lofty cathedral of the Christian, in which God is worshipped in a manner as nearly befitting His glory as the power and wealth of finite man can reach; art and nature here offer subjects, from the feudal castle, the vasty Escorial, the rock-built alcazar of imperial Toledo, the sunny towers of stately Seville, to the eternal snows and lovely vega of Granada: let the geologist clamber over mountains of marble, and metal-pregnant sierras, let the botanist cull from the wild hothouse of nature plants unknown, unnumbered, matchless in colour, and breathing the aroma of the sweet south; let all, learned or unlearned, listen to the song, the guitar, the Castanet; let all mingle with the gay, good-humoured, temperate peasantry, the finest in the world, free, manly, and independent, yet courteous and respectful; let all live with the noble, dignified, high-bred, self-respecting Spaniard; let all share in their easy, courteous society; let all admire their dark-eyed women, so frank and natural, to whom the voice of all ages and nations has conceded the palm of attraction, to whom Venus has bequeathed her magic girdle of grace and fascination; let all--_sed ohe_! _jam satis_--enough for starting on this expedition, where, as Don Quixote said, there are opportunities for what are called adventures elbow deep.

The following account of the rivers of Spain would do credit to the pen of Robertson:--

'There are six great rivers in Spain,--the arteries which run between the seven mountain chains, the vertebras of the geological skeleton. These six watersheds are each intersected in their extent by others on a minor scale, by valleys and indentations, in each of which runs its own stream. Thus the rains and melted snows are all collected in an infinity of ramifications, and carried by these tributary conduits into one of the six main trunks, or great rivers: all these, with the exception of the Ebro, empty themselves into the Atlantic. The Duero and Tagus, unfortunately for Spain, disembogue in Portugal, thus becoming a portion of a foreign dominion exactly where their commercial importance is the greatest. Philip II. saw the true value of the possession of Portugal, which rounded and consolidated Spain, and insured to her the possession of these valuable outlets of internal produce, and inlets for external commerce. Portugal annexed to Spain gave more real power to his throne than the dominion of entire continents across the Atlantic. The _Mino_, which is the shortest of these rivers, runs through a bosom of fertility. The _Tajo_, Tagus, which the fancy of poets has sanded with gold and embanked with roses, tracks much of its dreary way through rocks and comparative barrenness. The _Guadiana_ creeps through lonely Estremadura, infecting the low plains with miasma. The _Guadalquivir_ eats out its deep banks amid the sunny olive-clad regions of Andalucia, as the Ebro divides the levels of Arragon. Spain abounds with brackish streams, _Salados_, and with salt-mines, or saline deposits, after the evaporation of the sea-waters. The central soil is strongly impregnated with saltpetre: always arid, it every day is becoming more so, from the singular antipathy which the inhabitants of the interior have against trees. There is nothing to check the power of evaporation, no shelter to protect or preserve moisture. The soil becomes more and more baked and calcined; in some parts it has almost ceased to be available for cultivation: another serious evil, which arises from want of plantations, is, that the slopes of hills are everywhere liable to constant denudation of soil after heavy rain. There is nothing to break the descent of the water; hence the naked, barren stone summits of many of the sierras, which have been pared and peeled of every particle capable of nourishing vegetation; they are skeletons where life is extinct. Not only is the soil thus lost, but the detritus washed down either forms bars at the mouths of rivers, or chokes up and raises their beds; they are thus rendered liable to overflow their banks, and convert the adjoining plains into pestilential swamps. The supply of water, which is afforded by periodical rains, and which ought to support the reservoirs of rivers, is carried off at once in violent floods, rather than in a gentle gradual disembocation. The volume in the principal rivers of Spain has diminished, and is diminishing. Rivers which were navigable are so no longer; the artificial canals which were to have been substituted remain unfinished: the progress of deterioration advances, while little is done to counteract or amend what every year must render more difficult and expensive, while the means of repair and correction will diminish in equal proportion, from the poverty occasioned by the evil, and by the fearful extent which it will be allowed to attain. The rivers which are really adapted to navigation are, however, only those which are perpetually fed by those tributary streams that flow down from mountains which are covered with snow all the year, and these are not many. The majority of Spanish rivers are very scanty of water during the summer time, and very rapid in their flow when filled by rains or melting snow: during these periods they are impracticable for boats. They are, moreover, much exhausted by being drained off, bled, for the purposes of artificial irrigation. The scarcity of rain in the central table-lands is much against a regular supply of water to the springs of the rivers: the water is soon sucked up by a parched, dusty, and thirsty soil, or evaporated by the dryness of the atmosphere. Many of the _sierras_ are indeed covered with snow, but to no great depth, and the coating soon melts under the summer suns, and passes rapidly away.'

Here we have a sunny little sketch of a certain locality at Seville; it is too life-like not to have been taken on the spot:--