Barcelona has long been called the Manchester of Spain, and in the days before the “Gloriosa” it presented a great contrast to all the other towns in the Peninsula.  Its flourishing factories, its shipping, its general air of a prosperous business-centre was unique in Spain.  This is no longer the case.  Although the capital of Cataluna has made enormous strides, and would scarcely now be recognised by those who knew it before the Revolution, it has many rivals.  Bilbao is already ahead of it in some respects, and other ports, already mentioned, are running it very close.  Still, Barcelona is a beautiful city; its situation, its climate, its charming suburbs full of delightful country houses, its wealth of flowers, and its air of bustling industry, give a wholly different idea of Spain to that so often carried away by visitors to the dead and dying cities of which Spain has, unfortunately, too many.

It is becoming more common for young Spaniards to come to England to finish their education, or to acquire business habits, and the study of the English language is daily becoming more usual.  In Spain, as already remarked, no one speaks of the language of the country as “Spanish”; it is always “Castellano,” of which neither Valencian, Catalan, Galician, still less Basque, is a dialect—­they are all more or less languages in themselves.  But Castellano is spoken with a difference both by the pueblo bajo of Madrid and also in the provinces.  The principal peculiarities are the omission of the d—­prado becomes praoe—­in any case the pronunciation of d, except as an initial, is very soft, similar to our th in thee, but less accentuated.  The final d is also omitted by illiterate speakers; Usted is pronounced Uste, and even de becomes e. B and v are interchangeable.  One used to see, on the one-horsed omnibus which in old times represented the locomotion of Madrid, Serbicio de omnibus quite as often as Servicio.  Over the venta of El Espirito Santo on the road to Alcala—­now an outskirt of Madrid—­was written, Aqui se veve bino y aguaardiente—­meaning, Aqui se bebe vino, etc. (Here may be drunk wine).

The two letters are, in fact, almost interchangeable in sound, but the educated Spaniard never, of course, makes the illiterate mistake of transposing them in writing.  The sound of b is much more liquid than in English, and to pronounce Barcelona as a Castilian pronounces it, we should spell it Varcelona; the same with Cordoba, which to our ears sounds as if written Cordova, and so, in fact, we English spell it.

Spaniards, as a rule, speak English with an excellent accent, having all the sounds that the English possess, taking the three kingdoms, England, Scotland, and Ireland, into account.

Our th, which is unpronounceable to French, Italians, and Germans, however long they may have lived in England, comes naturally to the Spaniard, because in his own d, soft c, and z he has the sounds of our th in “thee” and “thin.”  His ch is identical with ours, and his j and x are the same as the Irish and Scotch pronunciation of ch and gh.