26 Notes of Spanish Travel. 



knowledge. He had observed that in the Bay of Biscay the 

 waters of the sea were, to his eye, unusually blue, but he did 

 not know the reason of that blue, and the rocks were red with 

 a vivid redness, but why they were red, or what rocks they 

 were, he knew not ; and he had observed on a hill a sticky, ill- 

 smelling plant, but why it stank, or why it stuck, or what plant 

 it was, he could not tell them. Having made that confession 

 of his utter incapacity to put subjects before a learned Society 

 such as that to which (they were accustomed, he might state 

 that there were two things, one of which he liked and one of 

 which he disliked in making a tour, of which he meant to speak 

 to them that evening. He liked to do a piece of business, and 

 he did not like to be tied to a plan, and he strongly objected to 

 be personally conducted. 



He had a piece of business to do, mainly in the North of 

 Spain, and there were one or two places he wished to identify, 

 one or two books he wanted to discover, and two or three facts 

 which he was anxious to verify. He was not going into any 

 matters connected with those, but in the course of a ramble 

 which had that general object, his eyes had been turned to what 

 he had seen going on around him, and he had made certain notes. 

 He had gone from Belfast right through to Orleans, a bright 

 and pretty town, and from that he went to Toulouse, which had 

 struck him as a place which exhibited one of the most forcible 

 contrasts of the old world and the new. Toulouse is a very 

 modern city, full of business, full of commerce and bustling 

 crowds ; but if one deviates but a little from the main stream 

 of its commercial traffic, he gets into the middle ages without 

 even having to take the trouble of a leap across a chasm ; and, 

 with its marvellous churches and crypts, the middle age appears 

 still to retain its pristine life. Then from Toulouse, skirting 

 the Pyrenees, he went to Louvre, and, having paid a little pil- 

 grimage there, he proceeded across the Spanish frontier. He 

 confessed it was with some degree of trepidation he felt himself 

 for the first time on Spanish soil, for he had heard and read a 

 good deal of rubbish about what was to be found in Spain. The 



