Madrid : Past and Present. By Mrs. Steuart Erskine. (John
Lane. 7s. 6d. net.)—Mrs. Erskine is to be applauded for the sincerity of her attempt to write a supplement to the official guide-books. Her volume will be useful to the tourist, but she does not help us " to travel in the spirit, while sitting comfortably in an armchair by the fire." Madrid is not created in her book, but only written about, and her powers of description are not strong enough to show, for example, that quality that distinguishes the Rastro from Petticoat Lane. We suspect that Mrs. Erskine does not know Madrid well enough. Neither has she given us her own personality in recompense for Madrid, nor brought to life the Spanish celebrities whom she met. She has not selected from what interested her the facts that will interest her readers. We are not fascinated to hear that the Condesa de Pardo Bazan drank " a glass of clear foaming ale, into which she put a liberal allowance of powdered sugar," while the rest of the party drank tea. The book is full of such trivialities. A few scattered and insignificant facts are all that Mrs. Erskine has reproduced of the sinister-glorious history of " Old Spain." Her chapters on the artists of the Spanish school are not sufficiently important to provoke discussion, and her slight remarks on El Greco, Velasquez, and Goya are harmlessly conventional. The chapter on Toledo suggests that with a more congenial subject Mrs. Erskine might have written a more interesting book.
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