ch 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 a