of the Chinese has triumphed over these obstacles, and Macao is still, the doctor tells 66 us, notwithstanding the enormous sums of money sunk by the English at Hong-Kong, the most European city in Hindu-China. The doctor omits here to consider the difference in time in the foundation of the one and the other. The Macaists, as the doctor calls the Christian population of Macao, boast of their nobility, and sometimes of their direct descent from the ancient conquerors of the land in which they live, but now almost all are born in Macao itself, and a very mixed blood flows in their veins. What is more remarkable, is, that the members of the same family generally bear little resemblance to one another. Every now and then a type indicative of anterior alliances, as has been frequently remarked elsewhere, springs up to life again. Thus, for example, the doctor describes a noble Macaist family of three girls and two boys: The eldest girl was a white negress, with woolly hair and thick lips; the second was an Andalusian, with a downy upper lip and beautiful black hair; the third, of an amber colour, resembled more a fair native of the banks of the Ganges than her sisters; and as to the two boys, they were Chinese! This must have been an extreme case.

These noble families are, for the most part, poor, proud, and ignorant. As the French nobles would once only learn the noble art of verrièrie, or glass painting, so the only manual labour a poor Macaist noble will condescend to learn is the art of printing. The women actually do nothing, not even house duties. Ask a Chinese what are the occupations of a Macaist, he will answer,

"The gentleman goes to Canton," which means, in the idea of a Chinaman, he is a sailor or a merchant; "madame waits for him at Macao, eating balichan."

Balichan is a condiment composed of prawns, fish, and aromatic spices; the doctor declares it to be superior to anchovy-paste.

If commerce has abandoned Macao and taken up its residence for the time being at Hong-Kong, the staff of those permanent armies that incessantly besiege the gates of the celestial empire, the doctor tells us, remains at the Catholic city of old. The Portuguese and French Lazarists, the fathers of the Italian Propaganda, the congregation of foreign missions, all have their head-quarters there. It is in that little island that the most formidable conspiracies against Chinese superstitions are got up. The Protestant ministers, Dr. Yvan tells us, are rather zealous Propagandists of knowledge and learning, than of any particular form of belief; their labours are also likely to be both more generally spread and more lasting. Knowledge may pave the way to overthrow superstitions, which are not so readily merely supplanted by superstitions of another kind. Death inspires no terror to the Chinese. They write upon their tombs, "I have quitted the roof of my fathers and my native soil to sleep under these sacred shades, in an eternal sleep." To such minds death is repose. It seems almost a pity to disturb so pleasant a belief.

May-VOL. XCVIII. NO. CCCLXXXIX.

F

THE PARADISE OF SPAIN.

BY DR. SCOFFERN.

THERE must have been a time when beauty, all-predominant-beauty everywhere diffused, was the characteristic of Spain: when the broad sweeps of desolate La Mancha were clad with verdure-when the barren wastes of Alicante bloomed with flowers, and the frowning ranges of the Alpujarras were shaded with their pines-when the still beautiful Andalusia, irrigated by crystal streams from Moorish aqueducts, was a garden, clustering with pomegranates and roses, odorous jasmines and feathery palms. There must have been a time when all Spain was so lovely that its loveliness, for lack of contrast, would pall; when the eye, unceasingly regarding the beauty of surrounding objects, would tire, and the ear grow weary of ever-gushing fountains and warbling nightingales. It is no longer thus. Fierce contentions of warring races, through many centuries prolonged, have left unfading evidence of their progress in Spain. A long succession of unwise governments, more desolating even than wars, has also contributed to the result. Religious persecution has done the rest. With the final expulsion of the chivalrous, elegant, industrious Saracen, and the keen, calculating, mercantile Israelite, fell the prosperity of Spain; and the beauty of many regions departed; while forests were hewn down, and none planted in their stead, until vast tracts became desolate. Aqueducts, the pride of the Arabs, and monuments of their industry, have been either wilfully destroyed out of sheer hatred to their origin, or allowed to go to ruin; and this unrelenting process of devastation has proceeded until whole regions, once teeming with verdure and cultivated as a garden, are now arid as the Sahara, and scarcely more hospitable. Tracts, where only a solitary gum cystus, springing here and there, just serves to prove that vegetation has not entirely relinquished its claim to the soil, and scarcely afford sustenance to a few disconsolate goats. Now an enormous lizard will cross your path-now a snake. Not a little bird of any kind-not even the cosmopolitan sparrow; but the vulture soars like a spectre aloft, ready to pounce at the carcass near your feet. Then the sun!-that mighty, scorching, unclouded sun-glares fiercely down, burning into hard masses the parched-up earth. Glancing your eye along that wild expanse, the rocks tremble with radiating heat, like one vast brick-kiln. The entire panorama quivers and dances like a land agitated by an earthquake, or a scene, regarded through a telescope, in motion. The eye at length grows dim with contemplating the savage glare-the brain feels maddened. There is no shelter now, not even of a solitary tree; and the mockery of your suffering is enhanced by the sight of aqueducts now dried up, ramblas, or mountain torrent-courses, which only gush in winter, and white snow-capped sierras in the far-off horizon, telling of coolness, whilst your brain is on fire.

The only kind of loveliness, everywhere diffused, which still remains to Spain, is the loveliness of human face and form-a loveliness which neither foreign wars, nor native governments, nor religious persecutions have been able to efface. The blue-eyed Asturian maiden, the majestic

senora of Castile, the olive-tinted, languishing, mysterious Andaluza, with tresses black as raven-plume, and hands and feet modelled in such fashion of exquisite beauty as no hands and feet were ever modelled in before-and swan-like neck, half veiled in the folds of her gracefully waving mantilla-who so lovely as these! Yet think not, reader, that the beauty of inanimate nature has fled from Spain. It has not fled, but is concentrated. As many oppressed races of man, taking refuge from a conqueror, have leagued themselves together, localised their energies, interwoven their relations, nestled in inaccessible glens, and formed commonwealths, so have consolidated themselves in many a spot of isolated loveliness the undying natural beauties of Spain. There, in one of those exquisite spots, with the frowning sierras about you, shall you be enveloped in garlanded tresses of the wild vine as they cluster round the rubyflowered pomegranate, the quivering aspen, or graceful palm. There the turtle doves shall nestle in groves of orange-trees, and the nightingale shall sing, and the myrtle and jasmine shall mingle their perfume with the orange blossom, wild thyme, and rosemary. There the rain shall never fall. The earth shall be refreshed by dews, and irrigated by streamlets, and bring forth its fruits and flowers as under the wand of a magician. Torrents of sparkling water dash down the sierra from the melting snows above, and glide through the valley below like gorgeous serpents. All here is impressed with such beauty as poets dream of, and painters love to depict-but all around is savage, terrible, desolate! Mountains, whose peaked summits lose themselves in clouds, or piercing through the canopy, cut with faint outline of their snowy crests the goldtinted horizon. Their flanks desolate and bare; here black as night itself-there, glittering with disclosed mineral wealth under the noonday sunbeam, like some enormous jewel mounted on jet. Frowning like an angry giant at the vision of beauty below, and threatening to destroy it, thus seems the sierra Yet, as those rugged flanks sink into the valley where you stand, they lose their desolation. Gradually vegetable forms appear. First the stunted pine, then the oak-then follows the chestnut, and now clustering on natural terraces the vine. The terrific, as an attribute, is seen no more. Olive-trees, of grotesque form, with hue of dusky green, seal the compact of peace between the two contending elements the lovely and the terrific. Now, with graceful curve the mountain flank sweeps into the valley, and you are lost in a maze of palms, apricots, and sugar-canes, or, it may be, citron, orange, and lemon-trees, with the beautiful pomegranate springing like brushwood underneath. Large bushes of wild thyme and rosemary crash beneath your feet, and contribute their mite to the delicious perfume which comes borne to you on every breeze. Magnificent aloes elevate their gorgeous flower-decked spikelets more than thirty feet high, and gigantic cactuses, rising here and there, bend under their luscious fruit-bearing treasure the prickly pear. Ah! how lovely-how exquisitely lovely-are those valleys of Andalusia! All that pagan sybarite could have longed for as the scene of his pleasurable rest-all that Mahomet could have pictured in his dreamy reveries as the scene of a paradise for dark-eyed houris— all that we of purer faith depict to ourselves as the attributes of a past Eden-they are there! In the sky above, and the flowers beneath, and luscious fruits, and crystal streams-they are there!

And now, lost in reverie, creating for ourselves an innocent pantheon with feigned spiritual attributes of tree and flower, regard those quivering aspens as they whisper to the breeze, and listen to their tale. Wild vines encircle them, climb up their trunks, hang from one to another in graceful festoons, and hold the whole forest in their close embrace. Guardians of their forest charge, those wild vines tightly cling, and the whispering aspens seem to say, Protect us from destruction! But awaking at length from reverie, to treat of real things and real times, let the reader be briefly informed, that circumstances took me, in the early part of the year 1850, to Spain. Took me, not to live in large hotels and big cities, those hateful foci of propagandism for extraneous habits, which undermine all nationality, jumbling together things the most incongruous, making the nations of the earth alike in one condition of mediocrity, chasing away poetic visions, uprooting romance, desecrating the most sacred regions with the omnipresent bifstick and stumpy bottles of porter. Thanks to many circumstances which need not be detailed here, Spain, even in her large cities, is still pretty free of these, but I avoided even the trace of them, by taking up my quarters in a little Andalusian town, where not half a dozen of my country people had been seen before; a town situated in a delightful little valley, or vega, close to the Mediterranean, and called Motril, a town which some maps of Spain do themselves the honour to indicate, and some do not-more shame to them.

A very curious place to get at is this vega of Motril, and when once there, a very curious place to get out of. On three sides a semicircular offset from the Alpujarras hem it in, elevating their summits far above, until they terminate in the Sierra Nevada, some fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. On the fourth side is the Mediterranean, but neither harbour, nor jetty, nor roadstead is there. Ships that do come are very few, and come at their peril, for this tranquil-looking Mediterranean is far from being so innocent as it seems; and although no crested billows mantle upon its blue surface, as we see in the turbulent Atlantic, and no foaming spray comes dashing over the cliffs, yet a certain quiet mysterious swell, which the Mediterranean here assumes, plays sad pranks at times. Particularly inaccessible, then, is this vega of Motril-primitive, isolated, and beautiful. Once there, a remembrance of physical exertion passed indisposes you to think of removing again, so down you settle in your dolce far niente, and although there is no bull arena in Motril, nor could fighting bulls be brought there from the Ganaderas, except Madame Poitevin should bring them attached to her balloon; and although not one bookseller's shop exists in the whole valley, not one spring carriage, neither theatre, hotel, nor any of those public loungingplaces where people are wont to resort, yet I managed to live very happily in Motril. In the vega is abundant game, which a stranger who has ingratiated himself may shoot. In the mountain gorges are vast stores of mineral wealth to be explored; and in the valley is such an assemblage of vegetable products, tropical and temperate, as nowhere else exists. There is the cotton and indigo, date, palm, and sugar-cane, mingling with oranges, citrons, limes, and lemons, roses, pinks, and geraniums, of delicious fragrance, and a thousand other productions which would be tedious to describe. A visitor inclined to the study of natural history, may long enjoy the contemplation of these varied trea

sures; and, should he possess an artist's eye, alive to all that is gorgeous in mountain scenery and wild luxuriance of vegetable form, another source of pleasure would be found. Should he delight in contemplating past greatness, and retracing on the wings of imagination those romantic days when Andalusia was peopled by the Saracen race, this is the very place for begetting these contemplations.

Moorish buildings surround him on every side, from the houses in the valley itself to the embattled watch-towers on mountain elevations. In the same vega, or almost the same, for a very insignificant spur of the mountain divides them, and they are both comprehended in one semicircular contour, is the celebrated fortress of Salobreña, the chief maritime stronghold of the Moor, and only forty miles distant from his cherished Alhambra. This was the last spot held by the retreating Saracens. Here the flying Boabdil rested when hastening to Africa. This was the scene of many a bloody fray between turbaned Saracen and Christian knight, particularly on that memorable occasion when the lion-hearted Perez del Pulgar, he of the great deeds, as historians call him, and who has been graphically described to us by Bulwer and Washington Irving, punished the treachery of the Mudaxares. And to vivify all these heroic deeds, and bring them prominently before the mind's eye, a descendant of the hero, and who now resides at Motril, Doña Aurora del Pulgar de Chacon, will herself recite the chivalrous deeds. Despite lack of bull-fighting and theatres, then, one may be very happy in Motril; but it would be ingratitude itself to omit from my list things agreeable in Motril—the balls and tertulias of the Marqueza di Puerto Santa Maria. Should this reach that lady's eye, I beg her to understand I have placed her name so late in the list for the sake of emphasis. A very agreeable way of spending the evening are those balls and tertulias, and when a Spanish lady has once told you, "Señor, this house is at your disposal," she means what she says: Go when you like, introduce what friend you like, never except an invitation again, for you will not have one. If in your diffidence you wait for such, the hostess will think you are offended, or consider your conduct a disaire, which is the politest word ever yet devised for characterising something between impertinence and insult. Go and be welcome, then, but learn the language first. If you have doubts about your being at home, they will soon be set at rest by the lady of the house asking your name; she means your Christian name, for the surname in Spain is not called a name at all, but the apelido. You tell her your name, and she tells you hers, and so matters rest with you for a time, though the lady is not idle. Going the round of her lady friends, she whispers something, which of course you are polite enough not to hear, and presently the reason will be made manifest why she asked your name. She addresses you by it plainly, unadorned it may be, most likely, although in Spain, as everywhere else, ladies differ as to the amount of familiarity they are pleased to assume; and, whilst a few will Don the greater number will not. At any rate, to address you as plain Juan, Enrique, Piedro, or Pablo, as the case may be, is perfectly en regle without the prefix of Don, and you in return will not be thought impertinent if you address quite as unceremoniously a lady-no matter what her rank or social condition may be. Few Englishmen, however, would

any

you,