nd Africa, between
civilisation and barbarism; this is the land of the green valley and
barren mountain, of the boundless plain and the broken sierra, now of
Elysian gardens of the vine, the olive, the orange, and the aloe, then of
trackless, vast, silent, uncultivated wastes, the heritage of the wild
bee. Here we fly from the dull uniformity, the polished monotony of
Europe, to the racy freshness of an original, unchanged country, where
antiquity treads on the heels of to-day, where Paganism disputes the very
altar with Christianity, where indulgence and luxury contend with
privation and poverty, where a want of all that is generous or merciful
is blended with the most devoted heroic virtues, where the most
cold-blooded cruelty is linked with the fiery passions of Africa, where
ignorance and erudition stand in violent and striking contrast.

Here let the antiquarian pore over the stirring memorials of many
thousand years, the vestiges of Phoenician enterprise, of Roman
magnificence, of Moorish elegance, in that storehouse of ancient customs,
that repository of all elsewhere long forgotten and passed by; here let
him gaze upon those classical monuments, unequalled almost in Greece or
Italy, and on those fairy Aladdin palaces, the creatures of Oriental
gorgeousness and imagination, with which Spain alone can enchant the dull
European; here let the man of feeling dwell on the poetry of her
envy-disarming decay, fallen from her high estate, the dignity of a
dethroned monarch, borne with unrepining self-respect, the last
consolation of the innately noble, which no adversity can take away; here
let the lover of art feed his eyes with the mighty masterpieces of
Italian art, when Raphael and Titian strove to decorate the palaces of
Charles, the great emperor of the age of Leo X., or with the living
nature of Velazquez and Murillo, whose paintings are truly to be seen in
Spain alone; here let the artist sketch the lowly mosque of the Moor, the
lofty cathedral of the Christian, in which God is worshipped in a manner
as nearly befitting His glory as the power and wealth of finite man can
reach; art and nature here offer subjects, from the feudal castle, the
vasty Escorial, the rock-built alcazar of imperial Toledo, the sunny
towers of stately Seville, to the eternal snows and lovely vega of
Granada: let the geologist clamber over mountains of marble, and
metal-pregnant sierras, let the botanist cull from the wild hothouse of
nat