London:
GEORGE PHILIP & SON, LIMITED, 32, Fleet Street.
Liverpool:
PHILIP, SON & NEPHEW, 45-51, South Castle Street.
All rights reserved.
1903.
My dear Bárris,
As the pleasure and instruction I have derived from my different visits to Spain have been contributed to so largely by your unfailing kindness and invaluable counsel, so the culminating pleasure of this modest attempt to set down my impressions of your fair country lies in the privilege of inscribing the result to you. In you I shall ever feel that I have a firm and wise friend and lenient critic, and I beg you to enhance the obligation of friendship by accepting this dedication with the assurance of my regard and esteem.
Albert F. Calvert.
PREFACE.
THERE is a character in current drama who devoted his whole life to the writing of a book. He called it a “pamphlet,” because he had intended it to be a pamphlet when he started on his task, but in its completed state the work filled three mighty folio volumes. Although the present volume has not attained such gargantuan proportions, it is considerably longer than I had thought to make it. It is not put forward as an exhaustive or profound study of Spain and the Spaniards, but as a simple record of impressions of people I have met and places I have visited during a series of many journeyings in different parts of that greatly interesting and much misunderstood country. These impressions were meant, in the beginning, to form a small collection of sketches and appreciations; and, although the number has increased beyond the limits of my original intentions, the design and scope of the book have not been revised or amplified. The result of this desultory system of working is a string of disconnected chapters—the first fruits of fugitive note-book jottings collected over a period of several years—rather than a concentrated and comprehensive survey of the subject as a whole.
But the system was also fraught with an unforeseen technical difficulty, as I discovered when I came to arrange my illustrations. The photographs that I acquired—sometimes singly and sometimes in batches—during my frequent visits to Spain, increased out of all proportion to the “increasing purpose” of my manuscript, and in the end I was confronted with the alternative options of leaving out a great many of my most recent and best pictures of Granada and the Alhambra, or of publishing them en masse at the back of the volume.