the fierceness of her protest against spiritual and political
repression. It is an execration in rhythm,--a dance of fiends, which
Paris has invented to express in license what she lacks in liberty."

This diluted European, rather than Spanish, spirit may be seen in most
of the amusements of the politer world of Madrid. They have classical
concerts in the circuses and popular music in the open air. The theatres
play translations of French plays, which are pretty good when they are
in prose, and pretty dismal when they are turned into verse, as is more
frequent, for the Spanish mind delights in the jingle of rhyme. The fine
old Spanish drama is vanishing day by day. The masterpieces of Lope and
Calderon, which inspired all subsequent playwriting in Europe, have sunk
almost utterly into oblivion. The stage is flooded with the washings of
the Boulevards. Bad as the translations are, the imitations are worse.
The original plays produced by the geniuses of the Spanish Academy, for
which they are crowned and sonneted and pensioned, are of the kind upon
which we are told that gods and men and columns look austerely.

This infection of foreign manners has completely gained and now controls
what is called the best society of Madrid. A soiree in this circle is
like an evening in the corresponding grade of position in Paris or
Petersburg or New York in all external characteristics. The toilets are
by Worth; the beauties are coiffed by the deft fingers of Parisian
tiring-women; the men wear the penitential garb of Poole; the music is
by Gounod and Verdi; Strauss inspires the rushing waltzes, and the
married people walk through the quadrilles to the measures of Blue Beard
and Fair Helen, so suggestive of conjugal rights and duties. As for the
suppers, the trail of the Neapolitan serpent is over them all. Honest
eating is a lost art among the effete denizens of the Old World.
Tantalizing ices, crisped shapes of baked nothing, arid sandwiches, and