Introduction 



preserved the tradition of his attractive and unconventional 

 personality, and believed in his wayward genius. And, so, 

 I was prompted to read " Las Alforjas" again. It is always 

 a risky experiment to review in the searching light of long 

 experience the literary judgments of enthusiastic youth, and 

 in my case it was more than usually difficult ; because since 

 I had known and loved Cayley's book I had during the last 

 twenty years read all, and reviewed most, of the books on 

 Spanish travel published in England ; and my faculty for 

 admiration had been considerably diminished in the process. 

 For truth to say many of such books are hopelessly bad in 

 the eyes of a person who knows the country well. They 

 are written for the most part without any attempt, or 

 indeed opportunity, to study from the inside the national 

 life they profess to describe, and with no sympathy for the 

 country or the people. Railway travel, now general in 

 Spain, whilst enormously facilitating communication and 

 increasing the number of foreign visitors to the country, has 

 rendered it more difficult to join in, or even to see, the life 

 of the people ; and of no other country in Europe is it as 

 true as of Spain that a traveller who never leaves the iron 

 track and the saloon carriage knows no more of the country 

 when he leaves than when he enters it. 



So, although I knew that " Las Alforjas " was not open 

 to this objection, for Cayley wrote just before the era of 

 Spanish railways, I took up the book with a lingering fear 

 that the aroma of it that I had cherished for so many years 

 would vanish before critical scrutiny. It came through the 

 ordeal triumphantly, though not unscathed. One saw 

 immediately that if George Borrow had not written " The 

 Bible in Spain," Cayley would have written "Las Alforjas" 

 differently or not at all. The phraseology was somewhat 

 stilted and old-fashioned, and the verbal fun a little forced 



8 



