nymous friend may be
fully and promptly realised, declares his extreme distaste for any thing
in the shape of Spanish stock, whether active, passive, or deferred.
"Beware," he says, in his pithy and convincing style, "of Spanish stock,
for, in spite of official records, _documentos_, and arithmetical mazes,
which, intricate as an Arabesque pattern, look well on paper without
being intelligible; in spite of ingenious conversions, fundings of
interest, &c. &c. the thimblerig is always the same. And this is the
question:--Since national credit depends on national good faith, and
surplus income, how can a country pay interest on debts, whose revenues
have long been, and now are, miserably insufficient for the ordinary
expenses of government? You cannot get blood from a stone; _ex nihilo
nihil fit_." After which warning, coming from such a quarter, sane
persons on the look-out for an investment will, we imagine, as soon
think of making it in Glenmutchkin railway shares, as in the dishonoured
paper of all-promising, non-performing Spain.

The popular notion prevalent in England, and still more so in France,
that Spain is an unsafe country to travel in, is energetically combated
by Mr. Ford. It, of course, would be highly impolitic in the author of a
hand-book to admit that, in the country he described, the chances were
about equal whether a man got to his journey's end with a whole throat
or a cut one. But this consideration, we are sure, has had no weight
with Mr. Ford, both of whose books are equally adapted to amuse by an
English fireside or to be useful on a Spanish highway. His contempt for
the exaggerated statements and causeless terrors of tourists leads him,
however, rather into the opposite extreme. Believe him, and there is
scarcely a robber in the Peninsula, although he admits that thieves
abound, chiefly to be found in confessional boxes, lawyers' chambers,
and government offices. The _naivete_ of the following is amusing:--He
speaks of travellers who, by scraping together and recording every idle
tale, gleaned from the gossip of muleteers and chatter of coffee-houses,
"keep up the notion entertained in many counties of England, that the
whole Peninsula is peopled with banditti. If such were the case society
could not exist." The assertion is undeniable. Equally so is it that in
a country where civil war so lately raged, and where, until a very
recent date, revolutions were still rife, where a large portion of the