delineations of society as it exists in Seville, where the scenes for the most part pass in the patios and tertulias of the palaces of the Sevillian aristocracy; and those of a shorter kind, in which the interest lies not in the characters of the persons and the description of scenery or manners, but in the brief selection of incidents, which are intended to point a moral or adorn a proverb. There are one or two tales, such as 'La Gaviota' and Una en Otra,' which unite our first two classifications, but we class La Gaviota' with the first for the sake of the heroine. The first class, then, comprising La Gaviota,'' La Familia de 'Alvareda,' and Simon Verde,' are brilliant and fascinating pictures of Andalusian life, vivid with local colour, rapid in movement, and flavoured delightfully with that Sal Andaluz,' which is as proverbial in Spain as Attic wit was in the classic world; and these we intend to review somewhat fully.

Fernan Caballero's pictures of town life are by no means so attractive; although they will have much interest for those who wish to get a correct view of the present state of society among the upper and middle classes, drawn by a writer of the old Spanish school, whose prejudices Fernan Caballero shares to an amusing degree; but her digressions of continual recurrence against the spirit of the age intrude upon the current of the story, and her incessant laudations of the most intolerant abuses and childish superstitions of Spanish Catholicism are both wearisome and ridiculous. Personages are introduced to caricature modern ideas, like Don Narciso Delgado, the Spanish encyclopædist and adorer of a Ser Supremo, and Sir George Percy, the representative of the blasé and heretic Englishman; these are weakly conceived, untrue to nature, and fit only to figure in a farce. The heroines are fades from extreme goodness and convent innocence of character; yet the novels are redeemed from insipidity by some good portraits of old Spanish characters, and by here and there the graceful figure of a young, natural, lively and high-spirited girl of true Spanish physiognomy.

Of the last order of stories, many are written with power and contain fine descriptive passages, but the nature of the subjects is such as rather to please an uncultivated taste: their interest is the interest of crime; they principally treat of murder, assassinations, miracles, changed and supposititious children, and those grosser sources of fiction which we now leave to our theatres of the East and the students of the Newgate Calendar; but the attraction of this class of subjects for Fernan Caballero may be explained by her ultra-catholic tendencies.*

* In 'El ultimo Consuelo,' a son of a widow, after a career of crime, is sent to the galleys; he attempts to escape, and is smothered in a

To pass to Fernan Caballero's best tales: it must be allowed that she has been fortunate in obtaining Andalusia for her province as a novelist; where the brilliancy of the skies, the transparency of the atmosphere, and the fertility of the soil are rivalled by the never-failing gaiety, the quick perceptions, the poetic vivacity, the graceful manners and gay costume of the inhabitants. After passing through the Sierra Morena, on the route from Madrid to Seville, the traveller finds himself at once under a sky, whose sapphire depths have a lustrous transparency; and where the Flora of Africa rises gigantically among the familiar rosemary and cistus and wild thyme of the North. The adelfas, rose-laurels, hang their pink blossoms over the streams, the dark green hedges of aloes divide the richly cultivated fields of the vegas; the palm tree towers above the olive around the old monasteries and farms. The red flower of the pomegranate, the orange and lemon groves, become more and more abundant, and when in blossom load the air with perfume, mixed at sunset and sunrise with the dewy odours of a thousand aromatic plants. Even in mid-summer the sultry winds of Africa are delightfully cooled by the snowy summits of the Sierra Nevada, from whose peaks are to be seen enchanting panoramas, extending along the shores of the Mediterranean. Nature is not the harsh stepmother and mistress which she is in the North; here her hands are always full of gifts for her favoured children. The Andalusian confides in her beauty, and lives a life free from care; he takes no thought for the morrow -he expects the morrow will be no worse than to-day, and no better; and he lives content. He does his labour cheerfully, for his labour is light; and little as are his gains, they are sufficient to provide him with all the luxuries of life and all the pleasures he requires. It is impossible, perhaps, to imagine a semi-sensual felicity more perfect than that of the Andalusian; his daily life is precisely such a life as we see, in northern countries, alone on the stage. Music, dancing, singing, and the continuous exchange of smart dialogue, are things

El ultimo consuelo (the last consolation) is that he leaves his hand sticking above the mud, with the fingers in the form of a cross, to inform his mother that he died a true Catholic. In Callar in Vida 'y Perdonar en Muerte' (silence in life and pardon in death), a man of the middle class murders the mother of his wife for money; he escapes detection from all but his wife, who lives with the murderer of her mother till her death, and pardons her husband on her death-bed. Nothing can be more Catholic than these two stories, and nothing more grossly immoral than their tendency, which is to familiarise the conscience with crimes of the very darkest dye.

of which he never tires. When two Andalusians meet together, their tongues are never still: it is said that you could sooner stop the golden light of the sun, than the flow of speech of an Andalusian. As long as the Andalusian has anybody to listen to him he talks, when he is alone he sings. With his bread and his orange, his roasted piñones (pine kernels) and a little wine of the country for his daily food, he is as happy in the sun as a butterfly in the summer heat. Give him his song, his cigarro de papel, and his morena to talk to at nightfall at the reja, he would not exchange his lot for a principality. Nor is his mind unstored, if not with useful knowledge, yet with knowledge of a very pleasurable kind. This incessant conversation is a means of keeping alive an immense quantity of legendary lore; the great names of Spain are constantly rolling from his tongue. In legend, at least, he knows the history of his province; often in a romantic form transformed by the poetic instincts of popular imagination. Every ruined castle has its story of the Moors. The Moors are as common in their talk, as though the flight of Boabdil happened in the last generation. Women, when they wake at night amid the thunderstorm, cry to the lightning, à los Moros, To the Moors! to the Moors! and let them be converted at the sight of the anger of 'God!' But the most distinctive thing of all in the Andalusians, is their wit and their humour- the rapid thought, the sparkling eye, and the flashing speech- the good-humoured irony, the pleasant gossip and joke and merry saying, which is always capped by another and another, and which never gives offence.

Some notion of their conversation may be formed from the passages we shall presently translate from Fernan Caballero; but one quality which distinguishes their talk, it is impossible to give any notion of in translation, and that is, the enormous quantity of proverbs, in rhyme or in assonance, with which they intersperse their speech; and even when they are not actually quoting a proverb, their expressions have all the terseness of proverbial language. Spain is, everywhere, rich in proverbs: a huge magazine may be gathered from the speeches of Sancho Panza alone. Those in principal use in Andalusia are illustrative of the kindly, trustful nature of the people: such are Haz lo bien, y no mira à quien; 'Do good, and don't look to whom.' Quien no es agradecido no es bien nacido; Who is not complaisant is not well born.' Quand Dios no quiere, Santos no pueden; 'When 'God wills not, saints have no power,' is a reason for their contentment, as well as often an excuse for their indolence. Nor must we pass by the infinite number of Andalusian coplas

or rhymed stanzas, so numerous that there is hardly an accident in life, or a mood of mind, for which the Andalusian has not some ready copla for quotation. Not the least interesting of Fernan Caballero's volumes is one in which she has made a collection of Andalusian coplas and popular tales. Some of these are religious, some moral, some quaint, jocose, and burlesque, but the greater part amatory.

Moreover, in the imagination of this quick-witted people religion blossoms out into new flowers of pious legend and poetic sentiment. Everything which strikes the senses is embellished by some poetic invention, which flies from mouth to mouth, and passes into the legendary lore of the country. Seeing nothing about them but a smiling fertility, the hierarchy of the Catholic Heaven are to them beneficent beings to be approached with trust and confidence, and the familiarity with which they speak of God, the Saviour, the Virgin, and the Saints, must not be mistaken for irreverence; on the contrary, it springs from the belief that they are really the favoured sons of the faith, and from the vividness with which they realise the existence and beneficent watchfulness of their Divine protectors. There is hardly a bird, or a shrub, or an odour about which the Andalusians have not some pious and simple legend. The white poplar was the first tree the Creator made, and therefore it is hoary, as being the oldest. San Joseph told the serpent to go on its belly, because it attempted to bite the Infant Saviour in the fight into Egypt; and the reason of the existence of toads and serpents is to absorb into themselves the poison of the earth. The trees which are evergreen enjoy this privilege because they covered with their shade the Virgin Mother and the Infant Saviour in their flight into Egypt. Rosemary has its sweetest perfume and its brightest blossoms on Fridays, the day of the Passion, because the Virgin hung on a rosemary bush the clothes of the Infant Christ. Everybody loves the swallows, because they plucked out some of the thorns of our Saviour's crown on the cross; while the owl, who dared to look impassively on the Crucifixion, has been sick and afflicted ever since, and can utter nothing but Cruz! Cruz! The rose of Jericho was once white, but a drop of the wounded Saviour fell on it, and it has been red ever since. Children smile in their sleep because angels visit them. When there is a buzzing noise in the ears, it is because a leaf of the tree of life has fallen. Catholicism, indeed, with these people, is not a mere holiday form of worship, but a part and parcel of their daily life: every house has its crucifix, Virgin, or saint in the porch, with a light burning before it, and every morn and eve does the peasant uncover himself in the

fields or on the road at the sound of the Angelus or the Ave Maria.

It is curious to learn under what transformations our own heretical land appears to these people. An Andalusian tells the story of a countryman of his going to a land in the North,

"Where the earth is covered with so thick a mantle of snow, that sometimes people are buried in it." "Maria santisima!" said Maria, trembling. "But they are quiet people, and do not wear the stiletto!" "God bless them!" exclaimed Maria. "In that land there are no olives, and they eat black bread." "A bad land for me," observed Ana, "for I must have the best bread, if I can't have anything else.” "What gazpachos could they make without olive oil and with black bread?" cried Maria, horrified. "They don't eat gazpachos." "What do they eat?" "Potatoes and milk." "Bien provecho y salud para el pecho." (Much good may it do them.) "But the worst is this, Maria, that in all that land there are no monks or nuns." "What do you say, son?" said she. "What you hear-there are few churches, and these look like unfurnished hospitals, without chapels, altars, or Santisimo." "Jesus Maria!" exclaimed all but Maria, who with terror had become like a statue. Then after a while she crossed her hands with joyful fervour, and exclaimed: "Ay, my sun! ay, my white bread! my church, my most blessed Virgin, my land, my faith, and my Dios Sacramentado. A thousand times happier I, who was born here, and by grace divine will die here. Thanks to God you did not go to that land, my son! A land of heretics! - how horrible!"'

The following description from the Familia de Alvareda,' will make us acquainted with the habitation of an Andalusian campesino:

'The house of the family of Alvareda was spacious and scrupulously white-washed without and within; on each side the door, built against the wall, was a bench of stone and mortar. In the porch hung a lamp before an image of our Saviour, placed over the door, according to the Catholic custom of preparing all things by a religious sentiment, and of placing all under a holy protection. In the middle of the spacious court "patio," an enormous, orange-trce raised its leafy head from its robust and clean trunk. A circular trellis protected its base like a breast-plate. For an infinity of generations had this beautiful tree been a source of delight for that family. The deceased, Juan Alvareda, the father of Perico, had a traditional pride in making its existence mount up to the epoch of the expulsion of the Moors, after which, according to his assertion, an Alvareda, who had been a soldier of the holy King Ferdinand, had planted it; and when the cura, the brother of his wife, jested, and called in question the antiquity, and uninterrupted filiation of his line, he answered imperturbably, and without hesitating in his conviction for a moment, that all the families in the world were old, and that the direct descents and pedigrees of the rich were to be traced clear enough, but that the poor were only not so fortunate. The women of this family made of the