nor monuments of Art
at least which adorned its soil, would rapidly disappear. Their
disappearance would result naturally from what is called "progress" if
Spain should revive; while their perishing through neglect and wilful
damage, or peculation, would inevitably follow, if the ever smouldering
embers of domestic revolution should burst afresh into flame. Such has
been the invariable action of those fires which in all history have
melted away the most refined evidences of man's intelligence, leaving
behind only scanty, and often all but shapeless, relics of the richest
and ripest genius.

It is difficult to realise the rapidity with which, almost under one's
eyes, the Spain of history and romance "is casting its skin." Travelling
even with so recent and so excellent a handbook as O'Shea's of 1869, I
noted the following wanton acts of Vandalism and destruction, committed
upon monuments of the greatest archaeological and artistic interest since
he wrote. At Seville, the Church of San Miguel, one of the oldest and
finest in the city, was senselessly demolished by the populace as a sort
of auto-da-fe, and by way of commemoration of the revolution of
September, 1867. In exactly the same way the fine Byzantine churches of
San Juan at Lerida, and of San Miguel at Barcelona, have been "improved
off the face of the earth." Church plate, Custodias and Virils of the
D'Arfes, Becerrias, and other Art workmen, have vanished from the
treasuries of all the great ecclesiastical structures; whether sold,
melted down, or only hidden, "quien sabe?" The beautiful Moorish
decorations of the Alcazar at Segovia had been all but entirely
destroyed by fire, attributed to the careless cigar-lighting of the
Cadets to whom the structure had been abandoned. The finest old mansion
in Barcelona, the Casa de Gralla, probably the masterpiece of Damian
Forment, and dating from the commencement of the fourteenth century, has
been pulled down by the Duke of Medina Celi to form a new street. The
beautiful wooden ceiling of the Casa del Infantado at Guadalaxara, the
finest of its kind in Spain, in the absence of its owner, who I was told
lives in Russia, is coming down in large pieces, and once fallen, I
scarcely think it will be in the power of living workmen to make it good
again. The exquisite Moorish Palace of the Generalife at Granada, second
only to the Alhambra and the Alcazar at Seville, is never visited by its
proprietor, and is now one mass of w