trip from Cadiz is so easy a day's journey, that no necessity
for repose or refitting interferes with the impatience of those who
arrive to explore the external town. You speedily, therefore, sally
forth, and thread a few of the mazy streets; but without venturing too
far, on account of the evident risk of losing your way. Should you
chance to stumble on the Plaza Mayor,--called Plaza de San
Francisco,--you are at once rewarded by the view of the _ayuntamiento_,
one of the most elegant edifices in Spain: otherwise the extreme
simplicity of the bare, irregular, but monotonous white houses, will
create disappointment--you will stare about in the vain search of the
magnificence, so much extolled, of this semi-Moorish capital, and
discover, that nothing can be plainer, more simple, more ugly, than the
exterior of the Seville habitations. At length, however, some open door,
or iron grille, placed on a line with an inner court, will operate a
sudden change in your ideas, and afford a clue to the mystery. Through
this railing, generally of an elegant form, is discovered a delicious
vista, in which are visible, fountains, white marble colonnades,
pomegranate and sweet lemon-trees, sofas and chairs (if in summer), and
two or three steps of a porcelain staircase.

You now first appreciate the utility of the more than plain exteriors of
the houses of this town; and you admire an invention, which adds to the
already charming objects, composing the interior of these miniature
palaces, a beauty still greater than that which they actually possess,
lent by the effect of contrast. It is calculated that there are more
than eighty thousand white marble pillars in Seville. For this luxury
the inhabitants are indebted in a great measure to the Romans, whose
town, Italica, seated, in ancient times, on the opposite bank of the
river, four miles above Seville, and since entirely buried, furnished
the Arab architects with a considerable portion of their decorating
materials.

In a future letter I hope to introduce you to the interior of some of
these abodes, where we shall discover that their inhabitants prove
themselves not unworthy of them, by the perfect taste and conception of
civilized life, with which their mode of existence is regulated.

[Illustration: HALL OF AMBASSADORS, ALCAZAR, SEVILLE.]

LETTER XVIII.

THE ARABS IN SPAIN. ALCAZAR OF SEVILLE.

Seville.

The chief attraction of this most interesting of the provinces