of snowballing when they
come out here are obliged to pelt each other with oranges to keep their
hands in. One enthusiastic traveller compares it to a pearl set in
sapphires and emeralds, but adds--lest we should all be running to hug
the jewel--there is little art here and less society.

"Letters of exchange are the only belles-lettres." Indeed. Now this is
one of those wiseacres who are _in_ a community, but not _of_ it, who
materially are present, but can never mentally, so to speak, get
themselves inside the skins of the inhabitants. That city cannot be said
to be without letters which has its poetic brotherhood, limited though
it be, and which reveres the memory of Cervantes, as the memory of
Shakespeare is revered in no English seaport. Wiseacre should hie him to
Cadiz on the 23rd of April, when the birth of Cervantes is celebrated,
for in spite of intestine broils, Spaniards are true to the worship of
the author of "Don Quixote," and his no less immortal attendant, whom
Gandalin, friend to Amadis of Gaul, affectionately apostrophizes thus:

"Salve! Sancho with the paunch,
Thou most famous squire,
Fortune smiled as Escudero she did dub thee
Tho' Fate insisted 'gainst the world to rub thee.
Fortune gave wit and common-sense,
Philosophy, ambition to aspire;
While Chivalry thy wallet stored,
And led thee harmless through the fire."

With the respect he deserves for this wandering critic and no more, I
will take the liberty of saying that there is art, and a great deal of
art, in the site of the clean town; and that there is society, and good
society, in that forest of spars in the roadstead, and in the fishing
and shooting in the neighbourhood. When the Tauchnitz editions have been
exhausted, and when the stranger has mastered Cervantes and Lope de
Vega, Espronceda, Larra, and Rivas, there is always that book which Dr.
Johnson loved, the street, or that lighter literature which Moore sings,
"woman's looks," to fall back upon. I am afraid some prudes may be
misjudging my character on account of the frequency of my allusions to
the sex lately; but I beg them to recollect that this is Andalusia, and
that woman is a very important element in the population of Cadiz. She
rules the roost, and the courtly Spaniard of the south forgets that
there was ever such an undutiful person as Eve. Woman played a
remarkable part in the events of the couple of months after the Ro