her way with absolute coolness so as to clear the sunken _Diamante_, to
face certain and hideous death, is a picture which can never fade from
memory. It was said at the time by their enemies that there was not a
man in the Spanish fleet that did not deserve the Victoria Cross; and
this was all the more true because there was not even a forlorn hope: it
was obedience to orders in the absolute certainty of death, and, what
was harder still, with full knowledge of the utter uselessness of the
sacrifice.

It is difficult to imagine that anyone can read the record of this
heroic passage in the history of the Spain of to-day without a throb of
admiration and pity. No wonder that the generous enemy went out of their
way to do honour to the melancholy remnant of heroes as they mounted the
sides of the American ironclads, prisoners of war.

Cervantes gave to the world a new adjective when he wrote his romance
of _The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha_--a world in which the
filibusters are those of commerce, the pirates those of trade. When we
English call an action "quixotic," we do not exactly mean disapproval,
but neither, certainly, do we intend admiration; unless it be that of
other-worldliness which it is well to affect, however far we may be from
practising it ourselves. It is, at best, something quite unnecessary, if
acknowledged to be admirable in the abstract. The quixotic are rarely
successful, and success is the measure by which everything is judged
to-day. Be that as it may, the more intimately one knows Spain, the more
one becomes aware that what is with us an amiable quality of somewhat
dubious value, is one of those which go to make up the Spaniard in every
rank of life. His chivalry, his fine sense of honour, are nothing if not
quixotic, as we understand the word; and just as in Scotland alone does
one appreciate the characters in Sir Walter Scott's novels, so in Spain