and deserted. The whole of the documents connected with the discovery and conquest of the Indies are treasured up here; the papers of Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro lie hid in the mahogany cases which line the walls. They are all registered and dated, but not shown.

Seville is the head quarters of the gipsy musicians and dancers. Here, at Granada, or at Murcia, it is always easy to arrange for a funcion. "Make way for the gipsy-girl," says Walter Thornbury in his Life in Spain, "who is going to show us how the Egyptian ghawasses and the Hindoo nautch-girls dance. She will dance the Romalis, which is the dance Tiberius may have seen, and which no one but a gipsy dances in Spain. She will dance it to the old Oriental music of hand-clapping, and to an old religious Eastern tune, low and melancholy,-diatonic, not chromatic, and full of sudden pauses, which are strange and startling. It will be sung in unison, and will have a chorus, in which every one will join. Ford, the great authority in Spain, says these tunes are relics of the old Greek and Phonician music. Even their guitar, of that strange calabash shape, is Moorish; it is worn and played just as it was four thousand years ago in Egypt. The dancing-girl is, to tell the whole truth, not romantic; no antelope eyes; no black torrents of overflowing hair; no sweeping fringe of eyelash; no serpentine waist; no fairy feet; no moonlight voice. No. She is rather like a sailor's wife at Wapping. She has ropy black hair, drawn back behind her ears, in which dangle heavy gold earrings. She wears a large, red, cauliflowered-pattern gown, and her small neat feet are protected by strong high-lows; she is stout and thick-set, and by no means a sylph. I don't think the harebell would ever lift up his head again, if her strong foot had once come on it. She rises to the incitement of that quivering nasa wail that the wriggling cripple doles out from his straining throat, and, amid cries of 'Jaleo,' and various exclamations of delight, sways herself slowly with balancing arms and shuffling feet that hardly seem to move. Every now and then the girl lowers her arms, and begins to beat the palms of her brown hands together to the same low incantation tune that stirs you strangely by its supernatural and untiring ceaselessness. Her arms, when they sway, move in curves of perfect harmony; and her hands, when they beat, beat in low unison like a muffled drum. As for the recitative song, it is more fit for Irish wake-singers or Arab serpent-charmers than for festive dancers, who dance to the pulsation of their own heart-music, and what other extraneous help Heaven may send them. The perpetual hand-clapping is exciting, just as the perpetual low beat of the Sioux calabash-drum is exciting. It keeps the mind in a state of fevered tension highly stimulating to the imagination--tap, tap, tap, tap, it goes, like the perpetual drip, drip, of a wet day."

I am bound to say that Mr. Thornbury's typographical description of the Gitana is more accurate than Mr. Phillips' pictorial one. Graceful

forms and pretty faces may indeed be seen amongst them, but they are rare and are for the most part accompanied by a coarseness of feature and of figure which takes off the charm. Far more graceful and elegant are the songs

THE CACHUCA,

and dances of the Spaniards, as scen in the streets during some village fiesta, when the national costumes and customs yet prevail.

To describe or even enumerate the paintings by Murillo which adorn the walls of the Museo, the Caridad, the Cathedral, and almost every church and public building in the city, would take far more space than we have at our disposal. Some of his masterpieces are here. Seville was his birthplace and his home. He seems always to have regarded it with special affection, and to have worked with special enthusiasm upon whatever was intended to adorn its walls. The house in which he lived and died is yet pointed out.

The great glory of Seville is its magnificent cathedral. In grandeur and sublimity In grandeur and sublimity it not only surpasses every other in Spain, but probably it is unequalled in Christendom. The Spaniards correctly characterise their three principal cathedrals as "La de Sevilla, la grande; la de Toledo, la rica; y la de Leon, la bella." The extent of the church is four hundred and twenty feet by two hundred and sixty.* It is divided into seven naves, of which the centre rises to the immense height of one hundred and forty-five feet, whilst the dome of the transept is thirty feet higher still. Thirty massive columns support the roof, each fifteen feet in diameter. An enormous coro blocks up and encumbers the central space, and for some time prevents the from discovering the vast extent and magnificent proportions of the edifice. By degrees, however, its grandeur makes itself felt, and however much subsequent reflection may modify the judgment, few persons can visit this stately fane without feeling that they stand within the noblest Gothic church in Christendom. It was built upon the foundations of the Great Mosque, which occupied the site of a temple to Astarte or some other Phoenician deity. Traces of its Moorish origin yet remain, not only in a certain Oriental feeling which appears

* Ford says 431 feet by 315.

eye