would be striking even in Paris. The Prado is said to be a brilliant scene on a summer's evening. The palace is quite the grandest I know; but I have never been to St Petersburg. The shops are third-rate, and enormously dear. Cabs are good and cheap. House-rent is becoming exorbitant. The best hotels are expensive, (ours was sixteen francs a day;) but provisions are dear, and the cuisine is equal to Meurice's. In summer the heat is frightful, and in winter the cold blasts from the Guadarrama mountains cut with the sharpness of a razor; but in spring and autumn the climate is perfect, and while we never once felt it hotter than chilly Englishmen wish to feel it, we also felt that we had not come in vain in search of the sun.

The glory of Madrid is its Picture Gallery. Externally the building is not remarkable, but the long gallery as you enter is very imposing, and in this respect superior to the Louvre, that there is neither gilding nor ornament to distract you from what you have come to see. pictures, moreover, are well lighted; there is abundance of civil attendants, and you generally have the place to yourself.

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The main fault of the gallery is that there is no real attempt to classify the pictures in their several schools. The merit of it is the astonishing collection of really excellent pictures of all countries, as well as in the numbers of chefs d'œuvre of the greatest masters. Here, moreover, you come across painters not much known in England, such as Velasquez, the most natural and vigorous of portrait painters, and the somewhat sombre, but most meritorious productions

of José Ribera. I would only add that, after a somewhat careful study of Raphael and Murillo in this gallery, I felt most thankful for the natural way in which they have painted the human life of Christ. In a cabinet picture by Raphael the infant Jesus is putting his arms round the Baptist's neck, and kissing him. In another, the Holy Child is riding on a lamb, Joseph holding him. But the most domestic picture is perhaps one by Murillo, in which the boy Jesus, standing at Joseph's knee, holds in his hand a white bird towards which a dog is preparing to spring, while the Virgin at her spinning-wheel looks on. To be made to feel that the joys and sensations of childhood have been shared by One who, when He became man, took to Himself a humanity complete in all its sympathies and emotions; and that our blessed Saviour was once a childlike child as well as a true man, is surely a help and light of no common value.

From pictures to bull-fights is a rapid transition, but the Bull-ring is near the Museo, which possibly accounts for the connexion in my own mind. We did not see a bull-fight, for the only one that took place while we were there was on a Sunday, and under any circumstances it is hardly the place for a humane Christian man. From all I heard of it, the spectacle must be sickening and disgusting. The men no doubt are brave enough, and the bulls fierce enough, and the excitement must be appalling; but the horses, instead of being what they used to be, and in Spanish America are still, noble blood animals, capable of leaping over the bull, if he comes too near them, are worn-out jades, fit only for the knacker, and have to be goaded to their death. It often happens that,

after the bull has gored them, they run round the ring trampling on their own entrails; and sometimes a boy will run up, stuff the wound with straw, and so they do for the next day.

The most hopeful feature about the thing is, that the Queen in Madrid hardly ever goes to them; that the press is steadily writing them down; and that society very much takes its tone from France and England. It is possible, therefore, that in a few years' time this barbarous remnant of the old gladiatorial games may pass away.

Of course we went to the Escurial. Standing on a platform of granite at the foot of the Guadarrama range, it seems part of the mountain, which overshadows without dwarfing it: and, partly monastery, partly palace, in more senses than one it is the Versailles of Spain. Built on the plan of a gridiron, it is in shape a rectangular parallelogram, at each end flanked with towers surmounted by a gray spire, and with four tiers of windows. In the centre is the dome of the church, a grand and simple building that reminded me of St Peter's. The material is granite, so fresh that it looks as if it was finished yesterday, and the severe simplicity of the whole building is its chief merit. Under the dome is the burial-place of the sovereigns of Spain, from Charles V. to Ferdinand VII., each in his own sarcophagus of marble.

The library, with the edges of the books turned outwards, is chiefly interesting for a portrait of Philip II. in his old age, who glares at you out of the canvas with a dull, cruel stare. The royal apartments are small and tawdry; but any one who has read Motley's history,

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would take an intense interest in visiting the suite of rooms where Philip II. spent his life in the deliberate infliction of pain. There is the rough chamber where it was his whim to receive ambassadors; the tiny cabinet, with no window in it, where he sat at his desk hour after hour (for he was a glutton of work) reading despatches, and scrawling upon them; there is the chair on which he sat, the table where he wrote, the stool on which he rested his gouty leg; and just beyond, inside the church, and in view of the altar, is the spot where, in frightful agonies of body and mind, he breathed his last, gazing at the crucifix that could not save him, and listening to the priests who could not give him peace.

Toledo is one of the most interesting cities in Spain, and you can go and return to Madrid in the same day. It is perched on a kind of eagle's nest above the Tagus, which rushes beneath it through solid walls of granite, on its three hundred miles' journey to the Atlantic. The streets are very narrow, narrower than at Vienna. The inhabitants, who speak the purest Castilian, do not live in flats, as in Madrid, but each in his own house, with its pateo or inner court, musical with a fountain always playing, sweet and green with flowers, and cool with its thick awning to keep off the sun. Constantly our guide stopped us to point out some arabesque carving, or some ancient door studded with nails of a wonderful shape and thickness, (the Moors were great in nails,) or a deep well with its old iron lid. There are two beautiful synagogues here which, since the Jews were expelled from Spain, have been turned to all kinds of uses—ornamented with Moorish tracery in brilliant colour; and there is also a