eon-shooting, which was a great favourite with the late King Alfonso
XII., and was made fashionable among the aristocracy in Madrid by him,
is a very old sport--if it deserves the name--among the Valencians. Near
La Pechina, at Valencia, where the great _tiro de las palomas_ takes
place, was found, in 1759, an inscription: _Sodalicium vernarum colentes
Isid_. This, Ford tells us, was an ancient _cofradia_ to Isis, which
paid for her _culto_. Cock-fighting is still practised in most of the
Spanish towns, as well as in Valencia, the regular cock-pits being
constantly frequented in Madrid; but it is looked upon as suited only to
_barrio's bajos_, and is not much, if at all, patronised even by the
middle classes. It is said by those who have seen it to be particularly
brutal; but it was never a very humanising amusement when practised by
the English nobility not such a very long time back.

Whatever amusements, however, may be popular in the towns, or in
particular provinces, the guitar and the dance are universal. So much
has been written about the Spanish national dances that an absurd idea
prevails in England that they are all very shocking and indecent. It is
necessary, however, to go very much out of one's way, and to pay a good
round sum, to witness those gypsy dances which have come down unchanged
from the remotest ages. As Ford truly says, "Their character is
completely Oriental, and analogous to the _ghawarsee_ of the Egyptians
and the Hindoo _nautch_." "The well-known statue at Naples of the Venere
Callipige is the undoubted representation of a Cadiz dancing-girl,
probably of Telethusa herself." These dances have nothing whatever in
common with the national dances as now to be seen on the Spanish stage.
They are never performed except by gypsies, in their own quarter of
Seville, and are now generally gotten up as a show for money. Men
passing through Seville go to these performances, as an exhibition of
what delighted Martial and Horace, but they do not generally discuss
them afterwards with their lady friends, and to describe one of these
more than doubtful dances as being performed by guests in a Madrid
drawing-room, as an English lady journalist did a short time ago in the
pages of a respectable paper, is one of those libels on Spain which
obtain currency here out of sheer ignorance of the country and the
people.

Wherever two or three men and women of the lower classes are to be seen
together in Spain during