AMONG THE SPANISH PEOPLE.* Rose. has given us a book

which answers most fairly to its title, but which, being in a great measure a record of the personal experience of its author, and owing a good deal of its value to this very fact, is calculated to fill the reader with a curiosity, by no means impertinent, to know something more about Mr. Rose himself than his professional status as an English chaplain. The preface consists of but a few words, of which the following are the most important :—

" Tho history of the present book is soon told. By the generosity of friends, the author was enabled to travel throughout nearly the whole of the Peninsula. Being very poor, he frequently had to travel on foot, and dine and sleep with the poor, and knowing familiarly the various low patois, he mixed with the peasantry, and was able to talk with them. In the Spanish peasantry he found, what he had often sought, but not hitherto found, truth, brotherly kindness, chivalrous devotion, • Among the Spanish People. By Hugh James Hose. London : Richard Bentley and Son.

true nobleness of character, religion without cant, and every virtue,— mixed with a little dirt."

And we read on page 227 of the work, " He [the author] has often lamented that the impossibility of living without a profession which called him constantly to Madrid and elsewhere has prevented him from completing so interesting and promising a work, and forced him to leave the field open to the enterprise and enjoyment of another." Mr. Rose must excuse us if his writings have the effect of interesting us overmuch in their author. We are sure they are calculated to have that effect upon any one who reads and appreciates them.

The wandering Englishman arouses our sympathies. He is not a mere cicerone, and his own doings and sayings are as interesting as those of the Manuels and Pepitas among whom he lived. There is nothing that readers and critics of the present day attach more importance to than completeness ; we want to know all about the subject in which we are interested. And the experiences of an English chaplain in which we find nothing about the work to which we presume his life was devoted, does not completely satisfy us. Mr. Rose was not a distributor of Bibles, like Borrow, nor a dilettante traveller, like Ford, and we do not quite understand what he was. One thing is clear,—from an artistic point of view he has told us either too little or too much about himself.

The book under our consideration consists of some fifty chapters or papers, which fully justify its title. No former writer on Spanish life—not Mr. Ford, and perhaps not even Mr. Borrow— appear to have lived so completely and so much at home " among the Spanish People;" and Mr. Rose seems to share their sympathies, and indeed their prejudices, to a much greater extent than either of these well-known travellers and writers. His chapters on

" Spanish Herbs and Herbalists," for instance, will astonish many readers, who will be more inclined to admire his knowledge than to share all his ideas upon this strange subject, though the following account of the virtues of the ordinary garden verbena may be worth notice :—

" In England, the fine lady plucks a sprig and scents her hand with it ; so does the Spanish lady, but she knows well its value, and treasures and dries for winter use every leaf of it. It is hero well known as one of the finest cordials and stomachics in the world. It can bo taken in two ways, either made into a decoction, with hot water and sugar, and drank cold as a refresco and tonic, or better still, with the morning and evening cup of tea, thus,—put a sprig of lemon verbena, say five or six leaves, into tho teacup, and pour the tea upon it ; you will never suffer from flatulence, never be made nervous and old-maidish, never have cholera, diarrhoea, or loss of appetite. Besides, the flavour is simply delicious ; no one who has once drank their Pekoe with, will ever again drink it without a sprig of lemon verbena!"

Mr. Rose's admiration for the Spanish peasantry is thorough and refreshingly unconventional ; he does not even hesitate to compare them favourably with our English rural population. We know and we admire the Spanish peasantry, and while in this preference we cannot say we agree with him, we honour him for expressing his opinion. And we think we can understand his admiration. We are all of us, as Lord Macaulay says, inclined to judge of others as we find them, and to admit every excuse for the faults of those who are useful or agreeable to us. How much Mr. Rose knows of the English peasantry we have no means of judging, but he has evidently sought sym- pathy and solace among the humbler classes in Spain ; and when he has been poor and lonely, as he himself tells us, he has found kind words and kind actions ; he has been made welcome at humble boards, and he has learned to sympathise with the sorrows, to admire the virtues, and possibly to overlook thefaults, or even the vices, of his companions and his friends. That he has done so is but the natural result of a generous and warm-hearted nature, in which the critical faculty is not too much developed; and that such is Mr. Rose's nature is abundantly clear from his writings, both! Untrodden Spain, and his later work, Among the Spanish People.

And for the Spanish women Mr. Rose's admiration is unbounded. His book is dedicated " to the saintly Spanish lady" who nursed him for forty days ; his pages abound in eulogies on their beauties and graces, both of mind and body. He admires their faces, their feet, their busts, their carriage, their dress, their wit, and their good-nature ; he is ready to break a lance in favour of their purity ,though he admits the men are dissipated—and he excuses with Scarcely veiled admiration their ignorance, their superstition, and their want of anything approaching self-control. We have no desire to say anything against Spanish ladies. There is much in most of them to attract, much to admire, and we agree with our author that the women of the middle and lower classes are at once more attractive and more admirable than the ladies of higher rank, but we think they have found in Mr. Rose a somewhat over- Jealous advocate. It must be admitted, however, that he has wider experience of life in Spain than falls to the lot of most Englishmen. He has studied it among the prisoners at the 11, gaol at Alcalk, and among the washerwomen on the banks of the Manzanares. as well as on the shores and wharves of Cadiz, and iu the huts and hovels among the Sierras. He has been brought in contact with Spanish women under an almost infinite variety of circumstances. lie has seen them lying on the bed of death as well as dancing the fandango, he has been waited on by them in health and nursed by them in

all but mortal sickness. The reviewer has a right to criticise, but he cannot controvert the views of such a man as this. One of the most touching chapters in the book is the record of the life

and death of his little servant-maid, Manuela. No modest girl in Spain ever goes out to service without her mother, or aunt, or an elder sister, who is or has been married, —an arrangement which is considered as a matter of course in the Peninsula, but which would rather astonish our English maids and mistresses. Fancy having to take Mary Jane's mother into your house in order to secure the services of Mary Jane, and fancy a maid- of-all-work's aunt being inseparably connected with the idea of a maid-of-all-work ! Mr. Rose, however, understood and appreci- ated the arrangement, and we will not spoil the touching little story of his domestic griefs by giving an imperfect sketch of them here. The reader will enjoy it in extenso, as well as a

longish chapter in a very different strain devoted to the washer- women of Madrid, of whom the author declares there are no lees

than fourteen thousand working and washing away on the banks of the Manzanares. We are aware that, quite contrary to Eng- lish notions on the subject, the Spaniards are a very cleanly

people ; but if Madrid, which possesses only about a quarter of a million of inhabitants, requires 14,000 laun- dresses to get up its linen, we tremble to think how many hands must be similarly employed in " washing" a city like London. According to Mr. Rose's figures, one person in every twenty of the entire population of Madrid, including beggars, porters, grandees, and fine ladies, must be a washerwoman, and must devote her life to making clean the dirty linen of the other nineteen ! We fear Mr. Rose's statistics must be at fault here ; as his taste certainly appears to the present reviewer, when he says in the same chapter :— " The banks of the Manzauares have a certain picturesque beauty even here, on the outskirts of Madrid." Now, it is scarcely possible to conceive any stream more completely devoid of any- thing resembling beauty, whether picturesque or otherwise, than the Manzanares near Madrid, and indeed the wretched little stream itself, which is only fit for washing clothes—when there is enough water for the purpose—has been a subject of acorn and derision for great and small wits at all times. A mediaeval epigram on the subject is thus happily rendered by Warburton :-

" Of water though the channel bare is, A Royal bridge o'er Manzanares Uproars its head on high.

That costly bridge, if it were sold, Then might King Philip with the gold A little water buy !"

The accounts Mr. Rose gives of the condition of the various prisons he has visited in the course of his wanderings are • among the most valuable and interesting, if not the plea- santest chapters in the book. The present Government is gradually reforming the prisons and prison management of Spain, and the scandalous Saladero, in whose underground dens half the false money current in Spain used to be coined by the pri- soners, is about to be replaced by a building more worthy of the capital, and whose internal management will, we trust, be equally unlike the former. Of 8,000 shirts recently supplied to one of

the convict establishments in Spain, the Government inspector, who, we may be sure, was not over-particular, was compelled to reject 6,400.

This is how Mr. Rose describes a visit to the principal prison of the capital of Spain, in the year of grace 1876 :— " The iron gates swing back ; your stick or umbrella is taken from you ; you stumble down the dark, time-eaten, filthy staircase, and find,. in the courtyard below ground, some twenty or thirty of the very NUM of the capital, herding together, smoking, singing obscene songs, lying stretched out on the stones, or worse than this, recounting and boast- ing of their crimes. Some few are reading, for there is a regular criminals' cheap literature current, called the literature of the Suladero. I never, in my whole life, have seen faces of so bad and brutalised a type as those which swarmed at every iron grating. The place was terribly dirty ; wot, dirt, and litter strewed stairs and courtyard. Thence to the bleeping-placos, vaulted chambers, half-moon apertures admitting a ray of light, just enough to show the filthiness of the place ; stone-flagged floor, wet, and rocking with dirt ; long rows of sloping boards, oaten up with vermin, along the walls, for beds; while only

over one or two hung the dirty rug, which showed that the sleeper had some covering at night ; the heat great, the smell insupportable."

When the present writer visited this prison, not many years ago, he was not more struck with the miserable squalor of the prisoners than

by the fact that they had a band. The contrast was more grimly humorous than can be described, and gave the lie direct to a favourite Spanish proverb,—Donde hay musica no puede haber cosa Inaba. Music in a prison, and in such a prison !—truly a cosa de

Espafta.

But we have not space to notice the mass of interesting details and good stories, some sad, some humorous, which our author has collected in his chapter on Spanish prisons ; and we wish we could say more about the Guardia Civil, which is not only the most respectable and respected class of men in the Peninsula, but which is without doubt the finest and most efficient body of semi- military police in the world. The following is the account given by Mr. Rose of the creation of the force, in the year 1837, but he might have mentioned that they are the legitimate successors of the Santa Hermaudad, that powerful association with which every reader of Spanish history, or even of Spanish romance, is so well acquainted :—

" The well-known Spanish poet, Martinez de la Rosa, when returning from Granada to Madrid, in May, 1833, was unfortunately an inmate of a mail which was stopped by brigands, and himself robbed. Rising to be a Minister of Queen Christina, he seems to have remembered the events of the wet night at Almuradiel, and to have bethought himself of other wayfarers who might find themselves in a like position with himself on that memorable night. He accordingly organised and equipped a body of five thousand guards, dressed something after the fashion of tho French gendarmerie, who should patrol highway and mountain-pass, and constitute an efficient body of town and rural police. The development of this remarkable body of men has been gradual, but sure. The Civil Guards of Spain number, at the present moment, twenty thousand. They are trained as soldiers to act in bodies ; as policeman, in pairs ; and as detectives, but never stooping to any act of espionnage. Each foot guard is armed with Remington rifle, and some- times revolver; the mounted guards carrying a short carbine, sword, and revolver, and being in every case splendidly mounted."

The Guardia Civil seems to be the only satisfactory institution in Spain, and we have been struck by nothing more in the course of much travel in that country than how and why this bright spot exists and remains so bright on so very dark a ground. But Mr. Rose is hopeful about the future of Spain. Every one knows that its material wealth is immense, its resources almost unbounded. Stupid and oppressive taxation is the chief obstacle to a rapid and general development. But the young King seems to be doing his best. The establishment of the new, non-ecclesiastical University of Madrid is one of the greatest strides made by ignorant and priest-ridden Spain in the present century. The constitution of the University was not, of course, all that could be wished. But the fact that it is tolerated at all says more for Spain at present, and gives more hope for Spain in the future, than anything we have read in Mr. Rose's very hopeful book.