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Familiar Spanish Travels by William Dean Howells
page 90 of 311 (28%)
the capital where the zeal of the bulls, and I suppose, of the
bull-fighters, is such, it is said that there is a subtle decay in the
fashionable, if not popular, esteem of the only sport which remembers in
the modern world the gladiatorial shows of imperial Rome. It is said,
but I do not know whether it is true, that the young English queen who
has gladly renounced her nation and religion for the people who seem so
to love her, cannot endure the bloody sights of the bull-feast; and when
it comes to the horses dragging their entrails across the ring, or the
_espada_ despatching the bull, or the bull tossing a _landerillero_ in
the air she puts up her fan. It is said also that the young Spanish
king, who has shown himself such a merciful-minded youth, and seems so
eager to make the best of the bad business of being a king at all,
sympathizes with her, and shows an obviously abated interest at these
supreme moments.

I do not know whether or not it was because we had failed with the
bull-feast that we failed to go to any sort of public entertainment in
Madrid. It certainly was in my book to go to the theater, and see some
of those modern plays which I had read so many of, and which I had
translated one of for Lawrence Barrett in the far-off days before the
flood of native American dramas now deluging our theater. That play was
"Un Drama Nueva," by Estebanez, which between us we called "Yorick's
Love" and which my very knightly tragedian made his battle-horse during
the latter years of his life. In another version Barrett had seen it
fail in New York, but its failure left him with the lasting desire to do
it himself. A Spanish friend, now dead but then the gifted and eccentric
Consul General at Quebec, got me a copy of the play from Madrid, and I
thought there was great reason in a suggestion from another friend that
it had failed because it put Shakespeare on the stage as one of its
characters; but it seemed to me that the trouble could be got over by
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