Often our very virtue is our loss;

They suffer oft whose willing hearts have tried
To well deserve; and oft on such a cross

As Calvary's King our better selves are crucified.

Thus I need to express in twenty-four lines what a Spanish rustic of no education at all will better express in four. Of all the merits of the Spanish cantares, this, their pungent brevity, seems to me the best, as it were identifying itself with the lightning rapidity of the thought they so eloquently interpret. Their simplicity, too, derives from their obvious sincerity; one cannot help believing that this artless poetry has been exclaimed by countless thousands of voices, as a means, of winning applause, but of relieving the heart; without a wider audience than God alone; without a viler object than the conception of His presence.

This is the more apparent since it is the nature of the Spaniards to find spontaneous expression for every grief and joy in the powers of song. Listening in Spain to their cantares, I find the trustiest evidence of all that is most noble and ennobling, most loving and most lovable in all the land. Were I to move elsewhither, and chance to hear those strains repeated in a foreign country, they would restore to my memory the virtues and delights of the Peninsula more sweetly and more readily than any other token. No phase of the national literature has so enthralled me. They are like butterflies of rare, exotic splendour; but I should have satisfied myself with merely wondering; for more than once, in the attempt to convey them from their

home to mine, I have closed my hand upon their delicate forms, and when I open it I find them crushed and spoiled. Only the remnant of their beauty survives, and I have dashed from those pearly wings the bloom which, living and in their native land, they wear with so inimitable and untranslatable a grace.

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CHAPTER VI.

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS (concluded). VERY country must number among its customs a portion which have fallen into absolute disuse, and yet whose study is not only fascinating but instructive; for they are one of those supplements to history with which no careful chronicler or commentator can afford to dispense. Now it is religion they illustrate, now war, and now the fine arts, but one and all they bear an intimate relation to the people who the people who gave them birth, employed, and discontinued them, wearing with their users the selfsame dress of newness or antiquity, of gravity or frivolity, as the case may be.

The scope of this work would have to be quadrupled were I to examine in any comprehensive degree, the origin and raison d'être of ancient Spanish customs. An immense number relate to pious ritual; others, as I have said, are secular; others are both together; while many are local, existing merely within the bounds of a single district or comarca. Their aggregate is as copious as their nature is diversified, and obviously within so limited an essay it is only possible to instance three or four, out of at least as many thousands.

Says the author of the Discursos de la Nobleza de España, "It was customary with the Athenians, Romans, and other nations, that their cities and republics should possess a coat of arms and motto.” In no country is this usage more widely spread or more deeply rooted than in Spain, for which reason a glance at the arms of her principal cities and boroughs is not irrelevant to this chapter; and let me add that they boast, not only arms, but titles in addition. Now and again, while thumbing some ancient chronicle, one finds recorded the occasion when those dignities were granted; a feat of arms, a plucky sortie, a long sustained siege, and so forth. Thus the ancient and honourable city of León displays a lion rampant (the pugilistic attitude of the forepaw is striking), and for motto Muy Noble, Muy Leal, é Ilustre Ciudad-to wit, Very Noble, Very Loyal, and Illustrious City. The arms of Cádiz are Hercules, reputedly the founder of that venerable and evil-smelling seaport. He is in the scanty costume which was well enough, perhaps, some thousands of years before our Saviour, and strokes the manes of a couple of frolicsome and diminutive lions, of the bulk of a rather undersized fox terrier. Segovia has for arms her famous viaduct; Cuenca, the Holy Grail (or so it seems), surmounted by a star; Albacete, three towers and a bat; Santander, a ship and sea, together with a tower or lighthouse, and a couple of severed human heads, floating gruesomely in a blue sky. Granada is quite a scrap-book-roses, castles, flags, kneeling figures, lions guardant, and lions rampant, to say nothing of a motto a mile long, and a

bright shield as blue as her own heaven. Málaga is represented by her alcázar; Guadalajara by a knight on horseback, leading quite a little army of men against the walls of the town, with what seems to be unnecessary craft and circumspection, for the gate is wide open, and not a sentinel is anywhere to be seen; Coruña, by what appears to be the leaning tower of Pisa, straightened out for occasion and surmounted by an open book bearing the word Constitución. Underneath are a skull and crossbones, and on either side three mushrooms, gloves, or ink-pots-I am uncertain which. Palma of course includes a palm. Orense is an apoplecticlooking lion, dancing a hornpipe on a very unsubstantial bridge, at bridge, at one end of which is a tower. The "Noble and Loyal Town" of Cáceres has merely a castle and a lion rampant. This is in better taste. Toledo is a double eagle, with the lions and castles of the ancient kingdoms which these words imply; and Barcelona, two crosses and four crimson stripes upon a yellow ground, drawn, says the legend, by the four fingers of an old-time knight or king, with blood that trickled from his wounds upon the field of battle.

The titles may be granted on more occasions than one. Thus Barcelona is "Twice Most Noble," but only once "Most Faithful," twice " Notable," but "Distinguished" (Insigne), upon no less than five occasions. Add to this "The Head and Column of all Cataluña," together with "Egregious " and "Most Excellent," and we obtain a series of appellations not unworthy of the King of Spain himself.