The Spanish language is not difficult to learn—­at any rate to read and understand—­because there are absolutely no unnecessary letters, if we except the initial h, which is, or appears to us, silent—­and the pronunciation is invariable.  What a mine of literary treasure is opened to the reader by a knowledge of Spanish, no one who is ignorant of that majestic and poetic language can imagine.  With the single exception of Longfellow’s beautiful rendering of the Coplas de Manrique, which is absolutely literal, while preserving all the grace and dignity of the original, I know of no translation from the Spanish which gives the reader any real idea of the beauty of Spanish literature in the past ages, nor even of such works of to-day as those of Juan Valera and some others.

Picturesque and poetic ideas seem common to the Spaniard to-day, as ever.  Only the other day, in discussing the monument to be erected to Alfonso XII. in Madrid, one of the newspapers reported the suggestion—­finally adopted, I think—­that it should be an equestrian statue of the young King, “with the look on his face with which he entered Madrid after ending the Carlist war.”  What a picture it summons to the imagination of the boy King—­for he was no more—­in the pride of his conquest of the elements of disorder and of civil war, which had so long distracted his beloved country—­a successful soldier and a worthy King!

Spain is a country of surprises and of contradictions; even her own people seem unable to predict what may happen on the morrow.  Those who knew her best had come to despair of her emancipation at the very moment when Prim and Topete actually carried the Revolution to a successful issue.  Again, after the miserable fiasco of the attempt at a republic, the world, even in Spain itself, was taken by surprise by the peaceful restoration of Alfonso XII.

I can, perhaps, most fitly end this attempt at showing the causes of Spain’s decay and portraying the present characteristics of this most interesting and romantic nation by a quotation from the pen of one of her sons.  Don Antonio Ferrer del Rio, Librarian of the Ministry of Commerce, Instruction, and Public Works, and member of the Reales Academias de Buenas Letras of Seville and Barcelona, thus writes, in his preface to his Decadencia de Espana, published in Madrid in 1850:  “It is my intention to point out the true origin of the decadence of Spain.  The imagination of the ordinary Spaniard has always been captivated by, and none of them have failed to sing the praises of, those times in which the sun never set on the dominion of its kings.”  While professing not to presume to dispute this former glory, Senor Ferrer del Rio goes on to say that he only aspires to get at the truth of his country’s subsequent decay.  “There was one happy epoch in which Spain reached the summit of her greatness—­that of the Reyes Catolicos, Don Fernando V. and Dona Isabel I. Under their reign were united the sceptres of Castilla,