tosses off a glass of aguardiente, that Pastora Imperio makes
dancing....'"

I do not know whether one should classify _Rosinante_ as a book of travel,
a book of essays, a book of criticisms. It is all three--an integrated
gesture. Certain interspersed chapters purport to relate the wayside
conversations of Telemachus and Lyaeus--dual phases of the author's
personality shall we say?--and the people they meet. The other chapters
are acute studies of modern Spain, with rather special attention to modern
Spanish writers. One varies in his admiration between such an essay as
that on Miguel de Unamuno and such an unforgettable picture as the vision
of Jorge Manrique composing his splendid ode to Death:

"It had been raining. Lights rippled red and orange and yellow and green
on the clean paving-stones. A cold wind off the Sierra shrilled through
clattering streets. As they walked the other man was telling how this
Castilian nobleman, courtier, man-at-arms, had shut himself up when his
father, the Master of Santiago, died, and had written this poem, created
this tremendous rhythm of death sweeping like a wind over the world. He
had never written anything else. They thought of him in the court of his
great dust-coloured mansion at Ocana, where the broad eaves were full of a
cooing of pigeons and the wide halls had dark rafters painted with
arabesques in vermilion, in a suit of black velvet, writing at a table
under a lemon tree. Down the sun-scarred street, in the cathedral that was
building in those days, full of a smell of scaffolding and stone dust,
there must have stood a tremendous catafalque where lay with his arms
around him the Master of Santiago; in the carved seats of the choirs the
stout canons intoned an endless growling litany; at the sacristy door, the
flare of the candles flashing occasionally on the jewels of his mitre, the
bishop fingered his crosier restlessly, asking his favourite choir-boy
from time to time why Don Jorge had not arrived. And messengers must have
come running to Don Jorge, telling him the service was at the point of
beginning, and he must have waved them away with a grave gesture of a long
white hand, while in his mind the distant sound of chanting, the jingle of
the silver bit of his roan horse stamping nervously where he was tied to a
twined Moorish column, memories of cavalcades filing with braying of
trumpets and flutter of crimson damask into conquered towns, of court
ladies dancing an