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Much has been written of late about the Prince's memoirs, and it will not be amiss to recall some words which he addressed to me on the subject more than six years ago. "I shall not publish anything during my lifetime," he said. "There are so many events of which I am now the only living witness, and you will see how the publication of memoirs while I live would land me in every manner of polemic, and that, at my advanced age, I could not stand. But I shall leave papers and

history is just, but her judgments always tarry long-it may be thirty, forty years. Yet history is just.'

It was clear that he was contented to leave his work to the judgment of posterity and to abide by the result. And safely he may! History will, in due time, take proper account of this prodigious product of the nineteenth century, this man of mighty will and marvellous resource, strong in word, far-seeing in counsel, decisive in deed, ever patient to wait on events, ever quick to take occasion by the hand; a man not free from weaknesses, nor incapable of error, yet in all his public conduct and policy inspired by the high motives of fidelity to his sovereign master and devotion to his land.-Fortnightly Review.

THE oldest, purest (in blood !), and proudest aristocracy of Europe is by a singular anomaly of Spanish character the most democratic. When the Revolution devised its illusive rule of equality, which is nowhere, hardly even in aristocratic England, more conspicuously absent than in modern France; when America, assisted by the everadmirable Washington, proclaimed itself a free Republic, and travestied freedom as no constitutional monarchy of Europe to-day would dare to tyrannize, -neither could, in its most utopian dream, have conceived a casual outward equality more delightful than that which exists beyond the Pyrenees between seigneur and peasant, between master and servant, between prince and people, between shopkeeper and customer. Here Anglo-Saxon servility and cringing curtsey are unknown, uncomprehended. When the Infanta Isabel goes up to La Granja of Segovia to hunt, the villagers greet her gleefully: "Here's our Isabel. Good day

to thee, Isabel." No "princess" or "highness" or the obeisance of the serf. Merely a doff of sombrero from village lout to his sovereign lady; a smiling display of two brilliant rows of teeth and the familiar hand salutation of Spain from his mate, who greets the Infanta as one of her own sex whom she is charmed to see again. So when the Infanta Paz (unlike masculine, original, high-toned Princess Isabel, who rides like a man, smokes huge puras, and is as generous and intelligent as she is loud and virile), a gentle, feminine creature, rather of German legend than of heroic romancero, goes to drink Spanish waters or freshen drooping spirits along a Spanish shore: 'How art thou, Paz? the eye is refreshed by sight of thee." Princess Eulalia, with her golden hair and youthful gaiety, her schoolgirl abhorrence of etiquette, her innocent frédaines, is a pleasing representative to them of eternal youth. I was at Teneriffe when, on her way to Chicago,

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The

she stopped at the Canaries. "Good day to thee, little one," shouted the peasant women. "A happy voyage and a happy return." The Princess bowed in the homeliest, brightest way, and I noticed that whenever the "little one" was shouted emphatically, she waved her hand as well.

A duchess enters a shop. Do you imagine she will be more courteously received than a little milliner? Not at all. For both are instantly made at home, and treated to the hidalgo's finest manner. The one as well as the other will take a seat and lean across the counter, playing with fan and eyes and lip, in the same roguish intent to get the most for their money. The difference will be to the advantage of the little milliner, for the shopkeeper will ask the duchess a higher price, and that is all. And do you imagine there will be a pin to choose between the graceful familiarity, the amiable attitudes of the duchess and the milliner? None, except such as mark the value of breeding. The one will be common, arch, and pouting as befits her class, accustomed to win its way with grosser methods; the other will be the great lady quite unconsciously, with just those pretty distinctions of race and tradition that please and do not offend. For she is too simple, too democratic in the best sense of the word, to condescend. She does not regard the shopkeeper as her inferior because he has no social existence for her, and does not traverse her salons in evening suit and white tie. He finds his diversion elsewhere and has other interests than hers. Meanwhile, he is entitled to the same courtesy as her equals, and she has not the smallest objection to pay him in full the measure of consideration he tacitly claims. He may even discuss his family affairs with her, and be sure of a humane listener. If his daughter is dying of consumption, she will be immensely grieved in his presence, and forget all about it in less than five minutes. In this she is not personally to blame, for an incurable colossal selfishness is the most notable characteristic of the entire race. And while her expressive and mendacious eyes are filled with pity for him, she will remember to argue and bargain, just as she did a

while ago in exchanging agreeable pleasantries, for all the world like the little milliner. But she will never be the less a duchess because she and the shopkeeper are on the best of terms. Her unconsciousness of her rank in every-day relations, which would stupefy an English duchess, comes from the fact that she belongs to a prouder race. Had she a mind to sport her coronet in a shop, the owner and his attendants would speedily make short work of her decorative dignity. To them it would simply mean an underbred and foolish exhibition, for side, impertinence, and vulgar haughtiness are not defects the Spaniards will tolerate. This explains their inherent and incorrigible dislike of the Anglo-Saxon. You must in Spain accept the general recognition of human dignity: though you may be in never so violent a hurry, you must yield to the servitude of form, and waste precious time in convincing your fellowman, whose hand may even be extended to you in beggary, that you regard him. as no less a gentleman than yourself. Else are you not muy cumplido, muy formal," but a mere foreign lout.

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In a race in decay, the question of blood runs down among the lowest. In Ireland every grocer and bootblack imagines himself descended from a king, and in Spain the glover and the haberdasher may also be descended from a Gothic sovereign. The man the English tourist insultingly addresses as

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fellow" is possibly clothed in the imaginary glory of some such remote ancestor as Wamba or Childe Pelayo. I have known a Catalan shopkeeper who pointed to the portraits of Bourbon sovereigns, saying, "Papa y Mama Borbon." He meant that he was a son of the House of Bourbon, but the relationship remains obscure and unexplained to this day. What matter? He royally struts his shop, folds himself outside in the cloak of regret and remembrance, and romantically apostrophizes the shades of Papa y Mama Borbon, unaware that there is anything preposterous or ridiculous in his attitude. Princess and duchess, duke and lord, are his equal, though they enter his shop to purchase a pair of gloves or a yard of ribbon.

While the Spanish nobility do not,

as in England, concern themselves in the least with the improvement, the moral training, and sanitary arrangements of their dependents-are, instead, culpably indifferent to all that touches upon their comfort-they are considerably nearer their servants and their peasantry than any other aristocracy. In the most imposing palaces you will find servants swarming at night in villainous airless boxes accepted as rooms, often without a window, always without a fireplace. The servants never dream of complaining. The race is, from sovereign to beggar, a stoical and longsuffering one. Its standard of comfort is so low, that to go without fuel in winter and without air in summer is no reasonable claim to martyrdom. On the other hand, both servants and peasantry find their masters human beings like themselves, whom they may address at ease, whom at all hours they may greet in a tone of cheerful equality. I have heard a marquis, whose guest I was, exclaim at lunch: "Tiens! I was I was in the tram this morning, and when I offered to pay, the conductor corrected me, The señor is already paid for.' I looked around in amazement, and behold there was Manuel [his valet] on the platform smiling and nodding to me. Manuel the valet, being the first to respond to the conductor's call for coppers, paid for his master, whom he discovered to be seated within. I travelled on a Spanish transatlantic liner. There was a duke and his valet on board. The valet, like his master, travelled first-class, talked at table, offered entrées or cigarettes, with the easy air of a grandee. Neither the duke nor the valet expected or received a different treatment. When Spanish noblewomen travel with their maids on sea, the rôles are reversed. The maid, as far as I have observed, is an expense not justified by any rational return. Indeed, coming from Teneriffe to Cadiz, I have seen an unhappy colonel returning to the Peninsula with a sick wife and several small children, accompanied by servants of both sexes, obliged to rise at dawn to heat milk on a spiritlamp for the youngest baby, and to act all day the part of maid to his sick wife and nursemaid to the children, while the servants lay in the cabin or about

the deck moaning and clamoring to die. The colonel looked just as seasick and miserable, but he it was who had to do the work. Do you think he complained, or that the servants thanked him? Before leaving the question of servants, I should say that, though the Spanish servants are paid less than in England or France, and are abominably housed, their lot is a happier one than ours enjoy. The standard of civilization in their regard is as low as it can possibly be, removed by scarce a step from that of the middle ages. ages. But they have an individuality for their masters. If they are sick, duke or duchess will visit and help to nurse them. They are not called by their surnames, and their feelings are never wounded. Once at table, when a great family was spoken of, and wonder was expressed as to whether they had or not returned from the seaside, I heard the head-butler, offering at that moment a dish to the marchioness, my hostess, remark, "They have returned, for I saw the countess yesterday afternoon driving with la Marietta. Marietta was the eldest married daughter, the wife of an illustrious noble of Castile. Nobody seemed to mind. Coming down to dinner in a new silk blouse, the under-butler of the same house once greeted me quite contentedly: "Ah, what a pretty color! That blouse admirably suits the señorita. It pleases me greatly." Some of the newly made nobles are introducing British formality, and insist that the servants shall say Master This and Miss That; but this insistence on European etiquette at once marks them off as parvenus. At these houses, when you call, you are received as in Paris or London, by correct and inane automata, whose physiognomies and voices you never remember. But the servants of the great old houses smile, acquaint you with the fact that they are glad to see you, and when they hear that you are well, they cry out vivaciously, "Mi alegra mucho." If you happen to be ailing, they will offer advice and voluble sympathy. These are never to the visitor the servant of So-and-so, but Joachim, Manuel, Teresa, or Madalena.

This is the sympathetic side of Spanish aristocratic character; the absence

of pose, of snobbishness, the complete and dignified simplicity, the pleasant sense of equality in mere personal relations it exhales, and above all a pretty and indestructible personal kindliness of manner and action,-only surface-deep, it is true, but most captivating as far as it goes. I have known a marchioness send to one of her tenantry, an obscure and exceedingly common little teacher of English, on her saint's day, a magnificent bouquet and a dish of ice-cream. This English old maid was quite the poorest of her tenants, and for that reason the marchioness singled her out for all sorts of pretty attentions she never dreamed of bestowing on her wealthy tenants, without knowing her or caring in the least for her. For in Spain poverty is no blighting disgrace, and wealth is no glory.

Turning to the other side, it must be admitted that a drearier, an emptier, a less intelligent form of humanity does not exist on the face of the world than the Spanish aristocracy. Which half is the worse, male or female, it would be difficult to pronounce. Dress, gossip, and while young love, are the preoccupa tions of both. Wives, doing nothing, asking nothing but attractive raiment out-of-doors and plenty of gossip within, have on the whole an easy time, for Spanish husbands are the least exacting of their kind. Whether faithful or not, they are, as a universal rule, tender, devoted, wonderfully patient and gentle in the face of hysterics, scenes, and injustice. Indeed, this mild resignation is the keynote of national character, both in public and in private life. The higher you go, the more remarkable it becomes. I have seen a Spanish son, the head of his house, the father of a family, and the bearer of a great historic name, endure such injustice at the hands of a capricious mother uncomplainingly as left me staggered. And always imperturbably respectful and tender. He might blanch with wounded pride and affection, but never a protest, never the least diminution of filial deference. He claimed no authority along with the titles that came to him on his father's death. Once speaking to me of some reform he projected, he said quite simply, "That will be later,

when I am master." It did not occur

to him that the bearer of the family title, over thirty, was entitled to a voice in family matters, and that filial deference should stop short of complete effacement before maternal despotism.

The Spanish mother of all classes possesses a virtue I cannot sufficiently laud as a woman. It is rare that her preference is not given to her girls. I have known numbers of Spaniards, nobles and bourgeois, and the mother's favorite has always been a girl. One young countess, the mother of two of the loveliest little boys I have ever seen, and the most exquisitely bred, confided to me last summer the fact that she expected a third child, and intended it should be a girl. "I didn't intend hard enough the other tines, and so Juan and Luis came; but this time I think of nothing else all the baby's linen is embroidered already with the name of Agnes. I have told my babies that a little sister will come soon, and every day they ask me several times have I heard word of Agnes, and when she is coming. I have decided it is all a question of will, and so I am concentrating my whole powers of mind and will upon this little girl I long for." Six months later I receive news that Agnes is born, and the house cast into the tumultuous joy that usually greets the birth of an heir. Spanish mothers have an adoration for one of their daughters that surpasses the jealousy of any British mother for her son. must marry her-well, because it is the girl's accepted fate; but what difficulties what dislike and distrust of the son-in-law what manoeuvres to keep the girl in maternal bondage! If tradition and nature did not intervene, along with the human instinct of maternal pride-which desires, all in loathing, the proof of discernment of the jewels' value in some base masculine brigand-many Spanish girls would find it hard to marry. As it is, I know one mother, one of the greatest ladies of Spain (I may perhaps call her the third lady of the realm), whose behavior to all the aspiring grooms of her only daughter, a fabulous heiress for Spain, resembles that of the ogre of fairy tale, who forces the amorous prince through unimaginable paces, in the secret hopes of discouraging him. I am glad to re

She

ceive news from Madrid that the latest adventurer in the field of sorrow has stood to his colors, and, as the hero of fairy tale, is like to come out triumphantly to the tune of Mendelssohn's Wedding March in the Church of St. Francis (for there is no cathedral in Madrid) in all the promise of lace and orange blossom. But what modern betrothed of Paris and London without the romantic strain would endure such proof of fortitude and faith as that poor young Spanish nobleman daily endures for the privilege of overcoming maternal jealousy! I would not be a Spanish girl for my mind's sake, for my life's sake, for such an existence is intolerable to the average civilized and thinking being; but if I were content with the wadded atmosphere of the pussy cat or the pet canary, not free to live or think for myself, but smothered in satin cushions and caresses, fed upon the sweets of life, then would I choose to be an over-loved Spanish girl, the captive of home and parents, the spoiled idiot of humanity.

The singular thing about these pampered girls, whose parents are their slaves to an extent no British father or mother could ever conceive, and who, as a rule, repay their devotion and abnegation with the usual ingratitude and selfishness that mark the race, is that once they marry they in turn become as absorbed as their neglected parents in maternal love, and pay back quite cheerfully to their own child the love which they themselves took for granted without a word of thanks or an act of recognition. Of the most thankless of daughters are fashioned the most passionate of mothers. When one studies the problem elsewhere, and sees the unmerited misery of the daughters in Ireland, the coldness, inhumanity, and selfishness of the Irish mother to her girls of every class, the monstrous way in which the girls are sacrificed to their brothers, left without education that these may play the gentleman, deprived of the enjoyments and pretty fripperies of girlhood, the money that might have helped to establish them squandered by the most heartless and least sacrificing of parents on the face of the earth, and nothing left the unfortunate girls but penury and struggle and the dull old

maidenhood of dull and narrow Irish towns and villages, one is forced by sympathy to greet the excessive devotion of the Spanish mothers and lamentable spoiling of mentable spoiling of the Spanish daughters with indulgence. The years of youth are brief, and, after all, the parents are not altogether unselfish 1; they too find their profit and pleasure in their abnegation and tenderness. What matter if the unborn reap the full benefit? The sad part of the system is that in both periods the intelligence is left uncultivated.

Borrow expresses an unmitigated contempt for the Spanish nobility. But he should have taken into consideration its redeeming features. I admit that these are inadequate, just as are the virtues of the entire race. The war shows us the imperishable quality of their valor and their incurable inefficiency. The daily life of any Spanish nobleman will furnish abundant proof of both. I have known a young titled idiot, with less brains than a linnet, who spent his days at home in a rocking-chair, abroad in club or theatre or at the Plaza de Toros, who only lived. upon the mediocre resources of provincial pleasures, conduct himself like a hero in the terrors of anarchy at Barcelona. He was aware that the bombs were specially directed at him, as one of the foremost of the gilded youth; and wherever there was a post of prominent danger he claimed it, trod his way gallantly through dynamite, unblanched and haughty, and was one of the finest and coolest figures in the frightful Liceo catastrophe. Who can sneer at a race that produces idiots of this quality? this quality? Yet in his undecorative hours the fellow is completely insupportable, of a grossness and vapidity of conversation to abash and awe the uncleanest stage of Continental youth. It is true, in the matter of unclean talk, the Catalans bear a special reputation in the Peninsula, -and here the men do not wait for the departure of the women from the dinner-table, but utter remarks and pleasantries in their presence to stupefy even a reader saturated with the excesses in this form of wit of the classical literature of Europe. The famous esprit gaulois, whose modern voice is M. Armand Silvestre,