VALLADOLID.
VALLADOLID, “the rich,” as Quevedo calls it, a famous dispenser of colds,—Valladolid, of all the cities lying north of the Tagus, was the city which I had the liveliest desire to see, although I knew that it contained no grand artistic monuments and no modern buildings of importance. Its name, its history, and its character had a peculiar attraction for me as I had imagined them in my own way from my knowledge of its inhabitants. I expected that it would be a noble, cheerful, and studious city, and I could not picture its streets to my mind without seeing Gongora walking here or Cervantes there or Leonardo de Argensola yonder, and all the other poets, historians, and scholars who dwelt there when it was the seat of the splendid court of the monarch. And as I thought of the court I saw in the vast squares of this city, which had so won my heart, a confused mingling of religious processions, bull-fights, military parades, masquerades, balls—all the mad merriment of the festival in celebration of the birth of Philip IV., from the arrival of the English admiral with his retinue of six hundred to the final banquet famous for the twelve hundred dishes of meat, to repeat the popular tradition, without counting the plates of those who were not served. I arrived in the night and went to the first hotel, when I fell asleep with the delightful thought that I should awake in an unknown city.
And to awake in an unknown city when one has gone there from choice is indeed a very lively pleasure. The thought that from the moment you step out of the house in the morning until you return to it at night you will do nothing but pass from curiosity to curiosity, from pleasure to pleasure, that everything you see will seem new, and that at every step you will be learning something, and that all will be impressed upon your memory so long as you live; that through the livelong day you will be as free as air and as gay as a lark, without a thought in the world unless it be to amuse yourself, and that by amusing yourself you are at the same time gaining health of body, mind, and soul; that, finally, the termination of all these pleasures, instead of bringing to you a feeling of melancholy, like the evening of a holiday, will be only the beginning of another company of delights, which will attend you from that city to the next, and from it to a third, and so on as long as your fancy is pleased not to confine them within bounds,—all these thoughts, I say, which present themselves in a crowd as soon as you open your eyes, give you such a joyful surprise that
