12 SEPTEMBER 1868, Page 2

There has been a great deal of merriment at Mr.

Roebuck's choice of a term for abusing the Spaniards,—" the dumbfounded Spaniard,"—but this incriminated expression seems to us the only one of any merit in the speech,—not for its good sense, which God has been pleased to deny to Mr. Roebuck, but for its picturesqueness. It does, we think, contrive to convey a concep- tion of the Spanish mind awakening like Rip van Winkle from a sleep of three centuries, and opening wide its astonished eyes on the rush of modern progress. At least, if this is not what Mr. Roebuck meant, it is what his much ridiculed adjective suggests to us.