These brown-skinned maidens, with their heads wreathed with flowers, occupy one entire avenue, where they range themselves in lines, and solicit all passers-by to taste their buñuelos, a kind of insipid doughnuts boiled in olive oil. The presence of Moors and Jews from Tangier and other cities of Morocco, who come for trade, offering so-called Oriental curiosities, mostly manufactured in Paris and Birmingham, adds not a little to the attractiveness of the great fair of Andalusia....
The natives of Seville, even in Roman times, were noted for their frivolity, their indisposition to labor, and their love of pleasure, qualities which they have transmitted in an exaggerated degree to their descendants.
Venus was then, as now, their favorite goddess; her image was borne during her festivals upon the shoulders of women of patrician rank, and certain rites of the Phœnician Astarte, her prototype, survive in the ceremonies of modern holidays.
Some strange performances are to be witnessed on St. John’s eve, identical with the summer solstice, when numbers of both sexes assemble in the parks and along the promenades, to dance around the fires of Cybele, and leap over them when the clock strikes twelve; and at daybreak run in crowds to gather the mysterious vervain, associated with the religious observances of so many nations of antiquity. The coquettish graces and fascinations of the Sevillian ladies,—
“Skilled in the ogle of a roguish eye,
Yet ever well inclined to heal the wound,”—
the lively, semi-Oriental dances, the groups of grotesque maskers and musicians, the jaunty smugglers and bull-fighters, and the general air of gayety and enjoyment that pervades all classes, make it well worth while to lose a few hours’ sleep on the merry eve of St. John.
Seville, the “Queen of Andalusia,” the depository of the glories and crimes of a dozen distinct races, and nearly as many conflicting religions, is slowly emerging from the darkness with which priestly domination and Inquisitorial tyranny have enveloped her for centuries. Her age of discovery and victory, of sentimental gallantry, of chivalric devotion, is past,—the age “when dreams of conquest, and tales of golden lands beyond the ocean, were wafted on every breeze;” the age when Isabella, clad in shining armor, set forth at the head of her knights to besiege Granada; the age when Alonso de Ojeda fastened the scarf of the queen upon the dizzy pinnacle of the Giralda, and Ponce de Leon threw himself, sword in hand, into the lion’s den, in search of his lady’s glove; the age when Cortes and Pizarro, penniless adventurers, sailed upon expeditions destined to immortal fame; the age when Sebastian de Elcano, the lieutenant of Magellan, was received with royal honors after his circumnavigation of the earth.
Of the glorious deeds whose renown once filled the world the fruits were recklessly wasted, the memory alone survives. And now the proud old city, waking from the lethargy in which she has so long slumbered, conscious of her great natural advantages, seems determined to again reap their benefit and, if possible, recover her lost prestige. Her commerce is yearly increasing, fleets of shipping are anchored in the muddy Guadalquivir, and an infusion of foreign blood seems to have imparted new life to the deserted streets, where the treasures of America and Asia were once paraded, and bands of victorious soldiers of fortune landed from the galleons that, freighted with the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, were unloading their precious cargoes at the docks of the chief emporium of Spain.