Romantic Spain: A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. I)

BY JOHN AUGUSTUS O'SHEA, AUTHOR OF LEAVES FROM THE LIFE or A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, AN IRON-BOUND CITY, ETC .
IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I.

TO WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT, ESQ., IN TOKEN OF ESTEEM FOR HIS BOLD AND TRUTHFUL CHARACTER, AND OF GLADNESS THAT WE HAVE SO MANY KINDRED SYMPATHIES, This Book is Enscribed BY THE WRITER.

THIS simple recital of personal haps and mishaps in perturbed Spain from the abdication of Amadeus to the entry of Don Carlos, puts forward no claim to the didactic or dogmatic. Its chief aim is to amuse. Of course, if I succeed in conveying knowledge and dispelling illusions—in Tasso's words, if I administer a pill under a coating of jam—I shall be cock-a-hoop with delight. But I warn the reader I am not an unprejudiced witness. I am passionately fond of Spain and her people. Although years have elapsed since the events dealt with occurred, I fancy the narrative will not be hackneyed, for in Spain public life repeats itself with a fidelity which is never monotonous. I do not pretend to cast the horoscope of the poor little monarch who is in the nurse's arms, but Heaven guard him! 'Twere better for him that he had been born in a Highland shieling.
Should there be much individualism in these pages, it is intentional, and to be ascribed to the instance of friends. They said, Bother history; give us plenty of your own experiences. It is to be hoped they have not led me astray by their well-meant advice.

Which, being non-essential, treats partly of Spain, but principally of the Writer.
THE sun was shining with a Spanish lustre—a lustre as of glowing sarcasm—seeing that on that very day a Fire-Worshipper, Dadabhai Naoroji, was over-shadowed in his attempt to become a Member of Parliament for Holborn. The sun, I repeat, was shining with a Spanish lustre while the inquisition was being held. The tribunal was in the open air, under the mid plane-tree in Camberwell Green, the trimmest public garden in London. Conscience was the inquisitor, and the charge I had brought against myself was that of harbouring a vagrom spirit. I should have been born in a gipsy caravan or under a Bedaween's tent. Nature intended me to have become a traveller, a showman, or a knight-errant; and had Nature been properly seconded, I should have been doing something Burnabyish, Barnumesque, or Quixotic this afternoon, instead of sitting down on a bench between a tremulous old man in almshouse livery and a small boy fanning himself with a cap. Yes; I fear I must plead guilty. I am possessed by a demon of unrest; my soul chafes at inaction, calls aloud for excitement. Had I the ordering of my own fortune I should spread the white wings of a yacht to woo the faint wind (but it may be blowing freshly off the Foreland), or should vault on the back of a neighing barb with bushy mane and tail. But I am Ixion-lashed to the wheel of duty, leg-hampered by the log of necessity.