er's friends, including a considerable number of
newspaper scribblers. The power of the newspaper press in Spain is
enormous, and nearly all the leading politicians in Madrid either are, or
have been, editors or proprietors of some one of the principal journals.

The manners and peculiarities of the lower orders in Spain offer a fertile
theme, differing as they do _in toto_ from those of the corresponding
classes in any other country. They have furnished our author with
materials for some amusing chapters. The description of a roadside
_venta_, or inn, and its frequenters, is capital, and reminds us of some
of Lewis's admirable pencillings of Spanish life and interiors. The
amalgamation of grades of society, which in most countries would be kept
carefully distinct, but in the Peninsula hobnob together in perfect good
fellowship, the mixture of muleteers and alcaldes, priests and banditti,
smugglers and custom-house officers, all sitting in the same smoky room,
dipping in the same dish, exchanging the latest intelligence, local and
political, forms a strange but a characteristic and perfectly true
picture. _Apropos_ of smugglers, here is a small statement worthy the
notice of that sensible party in Spain which opposes the introduction of
foreign manufactures upon payment of a reasonable duty.

"Spain is, of all European countries, the most helplessly exposed to
contrabandist operations. With an ill-paid and sometimes ragged army,
and with revenue officers directly exposed to temptation by
inadequate salaries, she has 500 miles of Portuguese frontier and
nearly 300 of Pyrenean; and with a fleet crumbled into ruins, and no
longer of the slightest efficacy, she has 400 miles of Cantabrian and
700 of Mediterranean coast. Four hundred thousand smugglers are
constantly engaged in demolishing her absurd fiscal laws, and some
1,600,000 pounds weight of cotton goods alone, are every year
illicitly imported."

But things in Spain are now rapidly approaching that happy state when it
will become quite unnecessary for the gentlemen contrabandistas to expose
their valuable health to the Pyrenean fogs, or their lives in contests
with _aduaneros_. The system is becoming each day more beautifully simple;
and, strange as it may seem, the direct road for the importation of
contraband goods is through the custom-house. "Bribery is here reduced to
the old electioneering simplicity; and the t