On the other hand, the mere British traveller, knowing nothing of art,
almost nothing of history, and very little of anything beyond his own
provincial parish, finds all that is not the commonplace of his own
country, barbarous and utterly beneath contempt. His own manners, not
generally of the best, set all that is proud and dignified in the lowest
Spaniard in revolt; he imagines that he meets with discourtesy where, in
fact, he has gone out to seek it, and his own ignorance is chiefly to
blame for his failure to understand a people wholly unlike his own class
associates at home. He, too, returns, shaking the dust off his feet, to
draw a picture of the land he has left, as false and misleading as that
of the dreamer who has overloaded his picture with colour that does not
exist for the ordinary tourist. Thus it too often comes to pass that
visitors to Spain experience keen disappointment during their short stay
in the country. Whether they always acknowledge it or not, is another
question. To hit the happy medium, and to draw from a tour in Spain, or
from a more prolonged sojourn there, all the pleasure that may be
derived from it, and to feel with those who, knowing the country and its
people intimately, love it dearly, a remembrance of its past history and
of its strange agglomeration of nationalities is absolutely necessary;
nor can any true idea be formed of the country from a mere acquaintance
with any one of its widely differing provinces. Galicia is, even to-day,
more nearly allied to Portugal than to Spain, and it was only in 1668
that the independence of the former was acknowledged, and it became a
separate kingdom.

With all rights now equalised, the inhabitants of the remaining
provinces of Spain differ as widely from one another as they do from the
sister kingdom, while the folklore of Asturias and of the Basque
Provinces is very closely allied with that of Portugal. To judge the