BOOKS.

THROUGH SPAIN TO THE SAHARA.*

Miss MATILDA BETHAM EDWARDS begins her new volume with Catullus and ends it with an earthquake. If Miss Edwards is

not a sensation writer therefore, it is evidently not that she wants the courage necessary to support that character in an educated person. Yet she is not a sensation writer, though often brilliant, always interesting, and not unfrequently suggestive. Of course, in these bookmaking days, when even Christ has not escaped the bookmaker's rage, it is tolerably idle to say that Miss Edwards is in fact a bookmaker. But then she is a first-class book- maker, and her bookmaking is first-class bookmaking. Those who travel with Miss Edwards intellectual, at all events, travel intellectually first-class. A father might say to his daughter about to enter on her travels : " My love, read Miss Matilda Betham Edwards' travels, and see what she says, and see what she sees, and that is the way to travel, my dear." The man

who said this would be a prig—naturally—but then what he said would be true, for all that. The propensity of prigs for truth is

the most offensive part of their character. But this is paren- thetical. Practically, to return to Miss Edwards, it is almost as much a matter of indifference to the world that she should go through Spain to the Sahara, as it is that Lady Herbert should go

through Egypt to Jerusalem. But then we accompany, not Miss Matilda Betham Edwards, but the accomplished litte'ratrice. We

know that she has eyes to sei, and ears to hear. We know that she is not going to peep at old bones here, and down upon her knees there, as if the record of her tiny spiritual feelings could interest the world, or instruct her contemporaries. If Miss Edwards stops at trifles by the way, we stop too, because we feel beforehand that the cultivated bookmaker knows what she is about. She stops at her peril, and she knows that she must pay for stoppages in nuggets, not pebbles. She knows that you accom- pany her not to be the humble confidant of her self-satisfied vanity, but to use her eyes to see what you wish to see.

The reformatory at Mettray, and its farms, workshops, and enthusiastic founder, with his pet project, " I t maison paternelle," an offshoot of the reformatory designed as a " refined prison " for the " refractory sons of gentlemen,"—further on, the hospitable home of an excellent French pastor, who inquires with touching solemnity " what the great and good Spurgeon is doing at this moment,"—then the young woman acting as collector at the railway station, at Biarritz, who is so startled at the bare notion of two ladies travelling in Spain, that when applied to for " dos billetes de primera classe para Burgos," she asked time to consult the stationmaster on this per- plexing and extraordinary occurrence,—all these preliminaries

are touched off with easy discursion. And here, a propos of travelling, is something new. " Luggage !" says Miss Edwards,

" travel without luggage !" " let me, if I can, put down the absurd notion. I have travelled a good deal, and if I were writing a manual for all future tourists, I should affix as a motto to the book—' Always travel in your best clothes, and with half a dozen trunks at least.' Luggage and good clothes take the place of a train of servants. Luggage and good clothes ensure you good places, general civility, and an infinity of minor com- forts." La Rochefoucauld himself could hardly have plucked a more utilitarian sarcasm from the human nature of the railway age. With thrifty art the authoress makes this treasure-trove the peg on which` to hang her description of all the luggage she did carry, and, unabashed, the books she took with her to hatch her own. "Legion," she says, with happy unconcern, that is, to say, " half a hundred books about Spain, in French, German, English, and Spanish."

At Burgos the purples and crimsons and the autumn gold come to a sharp end. The haughty wild Castilian desert begins, plains of grey sand, columnar masses of granite, blue-green bosses of pine forest cut out upon a bright blue sky, a rare village for an oasis, with ilex groves, yellow acacias, a narrow river winding near, and " groups • of wide-mouthed staring Sancho Panzas." What a picture for Calderon or Phillips ! Only let him keep the purples, crimsons, and gold somewhere in a corner for contrast. The touch which follows is extremely humorous. " We arrived at Burgos a little before midnight, and felt ourselves at last in Spain. The very air had a foreign smell, and so greatly did this feeling of novelty overcome us, that all our Spanish vocabu- lary land the fifty volumes ?] seemed to vanish just when it

* Through Spain to the Sahara. By Matilda Betham Edwards. London: Hurst and Mechem would have stood us in good stead." The idea of the new smell of the country driving the carefully parrotted language out of one's head is exquisitely natural and comical. After waiting

three-quarters of an hour at the station they find places at last in the omnibus, and " rattle away [which sounds odd in patient' Spain] to the Fonda del Norte. Two or three long-limbed, black-eyed, rosy-checked young women, wearing enormous chignons of false hair and no costume, unless untidiness can be called one, led us upstairs with flaring candles." Next day we have

the account of the table d'hote :—the dishes, all excellent—garlic, (of course) ; but " we had tortillas, patties of brain, water- cresses served with oil, olla podrida of . . . bacon, sausage, cabbage, maize cobs, lentils, and other vegetables too numerous to mention ; roast snipes, fig jam, and Burgos cheese." The wine is good, but tastes of tar. All in all we might elect worse than spend our

eld in Burgos, but for the cold. " The sun was shining bril- liantly, yet we shivered in our clean, bare rooms, which were

chimneyless, and only warmed by charcoal pans. Round these we squatted like Arabs, but to no purpose, and we went to bed at seven o'clock, finding bed the only warm place."

Miss Edwards' visits to the Cathedral of Burgos are not, on

the whole, interesting. She " does" the thing commendably, but really who cares about a tourist's view of a cathedral. We know all about the cathedrals. And if we did not, we should not ask tourists. For a simple reason. The knowledge concerned in a cathedral is technical, and technical knowledge must be technically studied. Historical bones do not fit tourists'

books, which ought to be like the child's basket of flowers—not tawdry and waxen, but gathered fresh. When Miss Edwards describes a regiment of Spanish soldiers as the "shabbiest set she ever saw," drilling to poor music, a sorry, spiritless sight, which all Burgos turns out to see, nevertheless, she tells us what we want to know. The 'single gauge' leading from the French frontier to the Spanish capital, the up train waiting for the down train half- way, and each going to its destination " as lazily as Kentish farmers jogging to market,—" these are all novel and valuable touches.

Miss Edwards went to Madrid to study Velasquez, and she has " done him " well. In an art examination for female com- petitors, the chapter on Velasquez would unquestionably get a high first-class. The " fifty volumes " have been read intelligently, and, thus informed, Miss Edwards' own penetration is quite up to - the mark. But if we prefer to accompany the authoress to a picture gallery rather than to a cathedral, we had far rather travel with her, and hear her impression of the thousand odds and ends of foreign life which she picks up at every turn. Nothing could be better than her entrance to Toledo. After travelling like a lazy, jog-trotting Kentish farmer, by rail, you might suppose that any vehicle kind enough to take you from the station to the hotel would move at a snail's pace. Not so.

" We were driven from the station at a furious rate in the diligence drawn by four mules, and the driver lashed them so furiously and vociferated so frantically that we thought he must be mad or drunk. Over the bridge we went at a galloping rate, and so on, up hill, down hill, till wo reached the town. Here, at least, I thought we should stop in our mad career, for the streets of Toledo, like all Moorish streets, are mere bridle tracks paved with flint stone ; and as the town, like Rome, is built on seven hills, you are always ascending or descending. But our driver never slackened whip or reins for one moment ; and, wonder- ful to say, the cumbersome vehicle emerged safely from break-neck alleys which looked hardly wide enough for a wheelbarrow. With such a dash, indeed, did wo drive into the court-yard of the Hotel de Leno, that we had taken the flattering unction to our souls that we were very wel- come guests. But on alighting no one took any notice of us ; and though the master of the house, with a staff of waiters and maids, were standing about, it never seemed to occur to thorn that we needed their services."

It is hardly possible to bring out better the comedy of the unforeseen, which is, in fact, the cream of travel. At Toledo it suddenly struck Miss Edwards that the best plan for tourists is " to go into a cathedral alone, and read nothing about it whatever." We wish it had struck her at Burgos. Presently she observes acutely concerning the gorgeous costumes of the Virgin in Spain, "that she [the Virgin] is petted and pampered with costly gifts, as if she were something below an ordinary woman, since even ordinary women aspire to higher things than a fine toilette," a remark thrown off at random, which all the wisdom of all the Popes would find it hard to answer as neatly. A good German lady took a more homely view, "Himmel," she said, touching the rich stuffs gingerly with her fingers, " what a pity such beautiful

things are not worn ! The silks must have cost six thalers a yard at least "—a naivete of blasphemous envy which seems so to have satiated Miss Edwards' ironical philosophy, that she straightway falls into a reverie of indulgent luxury over the blaze of so many gems in this spiritual " Aladdin's garden." This is amusing, but Miss Edwards threatens to return to Spain to study the cathedrals

seriously. We seriously hope she won't, or if she does, we earnestly trust she will not publish her studies. Her remarks upon the historical strata of Spanish life, the Spanish, Moorish, Roman, Gothic, Carthaginian, are well conceived, and show a broad intellect, capable of a sustained generalization. But somehow we always breathe more freely when the authoress descends from her intellectual observatory, and relates the gossip of Spanish women or the behaviour of ordinary Spaniards. Quaint as it may seem, the chignon has invaded Spain and perched on every female head, it seems,—big as a cocoa-nut. A slatternly, rosy-faced, bright- eyed, long-limbed, self-possessed, saucy, and indifferent hotel maid, with an enormous chignon and aristocratic manners, is a new " cosa de Espagna." Then the dilatoriness of everything Spanish is brought out till you feel it as if you were living in it. Manna, Matiana, takes possession of the imagination, and sits upon it.

Our space is exhausted, but the last part of the volume, which contains sketches of French garrison life in Algeria, is not the least interesting. These sketches are only extensions of Miss Edwards' Winter with the Swallows, formerly reviewed in this journal ; but they are illustrative, and convey real instruction. On the whole, we can recommend both volumes to all readers who take an inter- est in the study of social physiognomy applied to geography.