Introduction 



in places in poor imitation of Dickens. The love-making 

 in the letters, too, was a bit wearisome ; as indeed I had 

 found it in my youth. But when these little deductions 

 had been made, enough remained to stamp the book as a 

 work of genius, worthy to stand on a lower shelf as a little 

 classic in the same book-case as Borrow and Ford. 



The author was a young man of five-and-twenty, who in 

 1 85 1 was forced by ill-health to winter in Seville; and 

 with an English friend, and apparently prospective brother- 

 in-law, started with two bought ponies and the saddlebags 

 early in the year 1852 to ride slowly to the French frontier 

 at Irun. They were dressed, as, alas ! it would be impossible 

 for them to be now, in the smart old Andaluz garb, with 

 velvet-tufted calanes hats, embroidered jackets with silver 

 buttons, breeches and gaiters. Their road led them to 

 many famous cities, of which, truth to say, they show very 

 little appreciation. Even peerless Granada gets but scant 

 perfunctory praise. But upon the open road, in the 

 sunbaked villages upon sterile hillsides, amongst rude boors 

 sitting round the blazing fire of vine cuttings in inn 

 kitchens, Cayley is at his best : full of keen observation, 

 witty comment, racy description and whimsical fancy. 



The Spain he describes is that of Borrow seen in the last 

 years before the great change swept over it, a change that 

 in forty years transformed it more than the previous four 

 hundred had done. Gone now, or almost gone, are the 

 quaint provincial costumes that made of Spanish travel a 

 feast of colour and picturesqueness ; gone, in the consider- 

 able towns at least, the haphazard accommodation for 

 travellers, the overcrowded and verminous posadas, the 

 unsophisticated service and the scanty fare. The frequent 

 intercourse with strangers, too, has rubbed oiF some of the 

 old-world bloom from the manners of the people. But, 



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