ACCOUNT OF BOOKS. 



945 



«erlptive itinerary of tlie provinces 

 of Spain, which fills more than two 

 volumes and a half; and lastly, of 

 dissertiitions on the population, 

 manufactures, commerce, govern- 

 ment, laws, literature, and man- 

 ners of the country, which take 

 up tiie two concluding volumes. 

 The division, which exceeds in bulk 

 tiiat of all the other heads put to- 

 gether, the descriptive narrative, 

 is incredibly tedious, insipid, and 

 uninteresting, and, in many in- 

 stances, deficient even in accuracy. 

 The whole work is tarnished 

 throughout with plagiarisms, ana- 

 chronisms, historical blunders, in- 

 consistencies, and contradictions. 

 Of the plagiarisms and inconsisten- 

 cies, the following is an instance : 

 Mr. Laborde, in his introductory 

 discourse, follows the opinion of 

 Capmany, that at no period has 

 Spain been so populous, industri- 

 ous, commercial, and opulent as at 

 the close of the eighteenth century. 

 He acknowledges that the same 

 view of the subject had been taken 

 by Capmany. And in a note pre- 

 fixed to his introduction, he men- 

 tions that author as having been 

 extremely useful to him — extremely 

 useful to him ! why, he not only 

 adopts the system of that learned, 

 acute, and accurate historian, but 

 the whole of the arguments and 

 illustrations by which the justness 

 of it is proved. Laborde, by his 

 statement of the matter, assumes 

 the merit of being an original in- 

 quirer. He claims the indulgence 

 of his countrymen, for ' combat- 

 ing ideas generally received,' when 

 he is, in fact, the mere copyist 

 and translator of the Spanish his- 

 torian, whom he mentions only in- 

 cidentally as one who happened to 

 entertain the same opinion, to 

 Vol. LI. 



which he himself, it is insinuated, 

 had been led by a deliberate and 

 accurate investigation. 



It was scarcely to have been ex- 

 pected, however, whether he was 

 the original author, or only the 

 adopter of the system in question, 

 that he would have adopted those 

 silly tales that stuff the ordinary 

 books about the former state of 

 Spain. Yet the same Laborde, 

 who, in his Introduction, maintains 

 that " At no period has Spain been 

 so populous, industrious, commer- 

 cial, and opulent as at the close of 

 the eighteenth century,'' gravely 

 affirms, in a subsequent part of his 

 book, that, in the sixteenth cen- 

 tury, Toledo had 200,000 inha- 

 bitants ; that Seville contained 

 16,000 silk-looms, 130,000 silk- 

 weavers, and a population of 

 300,000 souls ; that the silk manu- 

 facturers of Spain employed, in the 

 sixteenth century, 1,100,000 per- 

 sons : that 300,000 Moors quitted 

 Seville when that city was surren- 

 dered to Ferdinand ; that, in the 

 kingdom of Grenada, at the time 

 of its conquest, there were three 

 millions of inhabitants, 400,000 

 lived within the .vails of Grenada ; 

 and that Cordova, under the ca- 

 liphs, contained a million, and 

 Tarragona, under the Romans, 

 two millions and a half of inhabi- 

 tants. Mr. Laborde, it seems, had 

 given credit to those idle fictions, 

 before he met with Capmany's 

 book. But that, after embracing 

 the system of Capmany, he should 

 have retained and published those 

 fruits of his former industry, can 

 be attributed only to that mercan- 

 tile avidity which hurried him on 

 to the publication of his book ia 

 order to catch the market before 

 it was closed. If he had delayed 

 3P his 



