that funds and engravers were equally scarce at Madrid, proceeded to Paris, where the advances were procured and first-rate printers and lithographers employed in giving form and substance to sketches and descriptions which were supplied by a band of Spanish fellow-labourers, artistical and literary. The former department has been better executed than the latter, an accident which will occur sometimes in the best regulated Books of Beauty. The ability of the French engravers has improved on the drawing of Villa-amil, which is undecided in outline and woolly in colour, while the meagre text has quite a classical look-such is the magic of fine type and paper. Again, the subjects of the prints, although chosen from well-known localities, are in themselves so attractive, that custom cannot stale nor repetition destroy their interest. It is to be lamented, indeed, that the director should only have had eyes for the empire provinces and those towns which lie on the high road to the capital. 'Castilla Monumental' would have been a more correct title than España;' but the illogical localism of Spaniards generally takes a part for the whole, and especially that part which is connected with self; and here in fact three-fourths of the Peninsula have been slurred over: no single specimen is given of the magnificent Roman monuments, in which Merida alone vies with the Eternal City herself, or of the Asturian incunabula of the ninth century; nor is one poor plate vouchsafed to the Alhambra, the magnet of Spain to all but Spaniards. The play of Hamlet is announced in the bills, but the part of the Prince is left out; and to complete this national trait, other men's works are reproduced without the slightest acknowledgment of the loan, e. g., the view of the Giralda of Seville (vol. ii., 62), which is simply conveyed,' to use the delicate euphuism of Master Pistol, from Mr. Murray's Illustrated Byron. Señor Villa-amil has moreover taken equal liberties with the original drawings of by far his ablest contributor, Don Valentin Carderera. This Arragonese artist, the Dugdale and Old Mortality of the Peninsula, has employed years in wandering over sierra and plain, amid the ruins of foreign warfare and domestic reform, and has rescued with untiring pencil many a gem, which, as we are told, and truly (vol. i. 62), had every chance to perish ere the plate representing it could be published. The value of accurate records of brands thus saved from the fire has been diminished by the director, who, an artist more than an antiquarian, has often tampered with outline and relative positions, adding in one place and suppressing in another, until honest Carderera failed to recognise his children thus kidnapped and disfigured. That gentleman needed not to be an Arra 2 L 2 gones gonese to resent this indiscriminate application by strange hands of the rules of subtraction and addition to his compositions:-a process unpalatable to painter and poet, whose genus (whether genius be or be not present) is irritable. He retired in disgust from the concern, and hence possibly the deficiency of new subjects; for few Spaniards travel in search of the picturesqueand still less a burgess of Madrid, whose terrestrial paradise is bounded by the mud walls that girdle the only court on earth,' which the envious angels in heaven are continually looking down on, and sketching-in the bird's-eye style, of course. The literary department is conducted by Don Patricio Escosura, an author as popular in Madrid, as unknown out of it. The text is bilingual-the sonorous Castilian runs side by side with the clinquant Parisian, in an entente cordiale, which, although now quite the mode, is very refreshing; the country of the editor is, however, announced by a breath of Españolismo, a soupçon of garlic, which all the perfumes and sewers of Lutetia can neither sweeten nor disguise. Every page evinces a passionate idolatry of Spain, the first of nations, and a fierce indignation against the envy, hatred, and jealousy of all foreigners, which coupled with their ' proverbial ignorance' on the things of Spain, goads them on to calumny and misrepresentation. All this Don Patricio professes to set to rights, and benighted Britishers are to be illumined, as the wild Irishers were by his namesake, St. Patrick; but there the parallel ceases, for our peninsular apostle is but one more weed of an imposing soil which promises rather more than it performs. That his style should be flatulent, that every noun substantive should be escorted by nine epithets, as Apollo is by the Muses, was unavoidable when romantic Spain was the theme, and a Spaniard the performer. Again, letter-press contracted for by print publishers is an annual, not a perennial, and the composers, like those who do the libretto for the Opera, are privileged to take leave of common sense. The engravings are sold, but the text, as Claude said of the figures of his landscapes, is given gratis; nor must the purchaser blame any one save himself, if he reads a line, which nobody expects him to do. Our Don it would seem was a victim to one of the thousand and one revolutions which now-a-days are the only things of Spain that can be calculated on as certainties. Exiled on account of a somewhat too ardent aspiration for absolutism, he wrote and sighed at Paris over vandalized Spain, more æsthetically than Marius at Carthage. As he sat and wept by the waters of the Seine, his Iberian harp was tuned to a Gallic key, in delicate compliment to the sensitive honour of his collaborateurs.' Professing to write history, which he does not, and deploring as he does does throughout the desolation of his country's monuments, no note escapes to tell who were the architects of ruin. Buonaparte is not named except with fulsome adulation; nor are those who delivered hearths and altars from torch and ruin mentioned excepting with a sneer; but as the blood of bulls sootheth the old Castilian, so to abuse 'Los orgullosos Islenos'-the proud Islanders -comforteth young France. Gladly will the reader turn from false sentimentality and verbose rigmarole, to the living, sparkling, and thoroughly national contributions by Don Seraphin Calderon, who is to Escosura what Carderera was to Villa-amil. Many of these smack richly of the 'salt and cinnamon' of Andalusia, and carry us back to sunny Seville-Zeviya de mi alma! The Robbers in a Venta' (vol. i. 49); the Horse-fair at Mairena' (vol. i. 58); and the Gipsy Ball in Triana' (vol. i. 66), are written with equal zest, spirit, and truth. How brown' the colouring, unctuous as an olla; how idiomatic the local fancy-dialogue; how full of aire y meneo' are the dramatic characters, and oh! how flat, stale and unprofitable is the French translation. Alas! why will not Spaniards, than whom none have a keener wit, tell us, like this worthy Calderon, all about themselves, their real homes and ways? Why will they most conceal what the world longs most to see sketched? Servile imitators of the foreigner whom they affect to despise, their so called better classes deny their fatherland, and renounce their brethren, both of which they seek to denationalize. They bore us with their second-rate copies of the long-tailed coats of London, and the common-place columns of the Bourse de Paris. They deluge us with all that we do not want to know, and withhold the attractive panorama which Spain presents in her dear own self, when her children, all tag, tassel, and filigree, dance under fig-tree and vine, while behind cluster Gothic ruins or Moorish arches-sights and scenes ravishing to all eyes save those of the Español ilustrado, whose enlightened vision, blind to all this nature, beauty, colour, light, form, and outline, is awake only to the degradation of poverty and decay; and while the humble classes rejoice in the compliment paid by the stranger, he half thinks such admiration an insult, and entreats you to inspect his paletot, or sketch the last spick-span academical abortion, to raise which some gem of ancient art has been levelled. The architecture of the Peninsula, like her history, is naturally divided into distinct periods; first, that of the Phoenicians, Romans, and Goths, then that of the Moors and Spaniards. The genuine antiquarians, however, down to this century, following the example of their great historian, Mariana, invariably begin this subject subject with Tubal and the tower of Babel-nay this is itself a date far too recent for some old Castilians and modern Basques. If, say they, the sun at its creation shone first over Toledo (which is certain), the pre-existence of that city must be still more so, and it may fairly be assumed to have been built by those angels, who, according to Ferreras, were the pre-adamite settlers in Spain, and whose language, free from the corruption of other tongues, is still spoken in antediluvian purity in the Bilboes.* Be that as it may, and by whomsoever these Spanish Welchmen were taught their alphabet and architecture, they have never since produced either a book or a building which has reached mediocrity. Assuredly the first benefactors of the Peninsula were the Phoenicians, those English of antiquity, who wafted everywhere on the white wings of their merchant fleets the blessings of commerce and civilization. Emphatically workers in timber,' the primitive meaning of an architect, they constructed the ships and ceilings of the wisest of kings, and all Europe to this day cannot compete with the gorgeous wood-carvings of Moro-Hispano art. The Phoenicians were welcomed by the natives of Tarshish-the south of Spain; men of peace not war, they settled on the coasts, and reared quays, factories, and temples. They were, however, ousted by the Carthaginians, who, when deprived of Sicily by the arms of Rome, turned exclusively to the Peninsula, and urged by a fierce spirit of conquest penetrated into the interior, where they erected cities, citadels, arsenals, and palaces, on which the simple Romans gazed with awe. All this strength and beauty has passed away like the fabric of a vision, scarcely a wreck has been left behind, save some colossal masonry at Tarragona, which still perplexes antiquarians. The very ruins of this remote period have disappeared, to which the sites at least of those hill forts that caught the military eye of Cæsar must be referred. But indeed some such castles are still perched on the eminences which guard the gorges and frontiers of southern Spain; they are decidedly Oriental in position, design, and construction, being built with a concrete rubble tapia, a sort of cob,t which originating doubtless with the children of Tyre has been continued down to the present time, on both sides of the straits of Gibraltar, and without any change. The language and arts of Carthage perished under the iron heel of Rome. The business of this nation of soldiers was conquest and government; they left the despised sciences to *See pp. 11, 44, Perochegui, Origen de la Nacion Bascongada, Madrid, 1760. The antiquity and process of this method have been detailed in a previous Number, 'Cob Walls, Quart. Rev., No. cxvi., p. 537. the the disarmed Grecian; with force and perfidy for their instruments, they passed the ploughshare over cities which dared to fight for their liberties, and seldom quenched flames save in the blood of resisting patriots. Pioneers of a new civilization, they effaced everything not of themselves, even to nationality; nor condescended to reconstruct except on the ruins of previous systems. Then, when all was levelled before them, they refounded throughout the length and breadth of the land purely Roman cities-the Italicas, Meridas, and Tarragonas-which seemed transported by their power from Italy to Spain, and whose character is so identical with their models in the mother-state, that no details are requisite. Many of their monuments still remain, although more have been used up as old stones by Spanish monks and mayors to build convents or repair roads. In their works of public utility the might, majesty, and dominion of Rome speak, as it were, from the piled heap under which she cannot be quite entombed; the aqueducts of Segovia, Merida, and Tarragona, which poured in rivers, the walls of Coria and Astorga, the bridges of Alcantara, Salamanca, and Merida yet exist; while shattered temples, theatres, and tombs still loom, grey, ghastly, and large, like the skeletons of extinct mammoths, or the works of ages when there were giants on the earth. The Spanish peasant, as he creeps along his own mule-track, side by side of the Roman pavement on which he fears to tread, or looks up with stupid wonder on colossal arch and pile, deems these monuments, which surpass his limited means, to be 'miracles,' the works of supernatural architects; and marvellous indeed even to us are the milagros' of Merida, as they stand alone in the loneliness, the things of other men and ages, and the quintessence of the poetical and picturesque. Time has dealt gently with their decay, as with a lovely woman, in whose sere of the leaf the lines of former beauty linger; built for eternity, and awful from Dantesque simplicity, there they stand, bearing nought now but the nests of the stork and the weight of centuries; they are the standards which the Romans have left wherewith to measure their genius and greatness. By their works shall ye know them; and these tell their authors, although the names of their architects are not recorded, so much were even such gigantic erections mere things of course. Their characteristics are solidity and usefulness; no tinsel ornament mars their breadth and dignity; in them grandeur is the result of bulk, and beauty arises from form, fitness, and proportion rather than from any intention of the designer, whose whole soul, engrossed in his work, was never disturbed by any pitiful vanity of self-exhibition or exaltation. Almost the only period of rest and settled government which ill-fated Spain has |