book remains, while the accomplishment of a finer artist in words may be remembered but vaguely. It is Irving who prepares one best for the stern grandeur and rugged solemnity of the country between Seville and Granada. The journey can now be made by rail. But to travel by road as he did—as we have done—is to know that his arid mountains and savage passes are no more exaggerated than the pleasant valleys and plains that lie between. For Spain is not all gaiety as most travellers would like to imagine it, as most painters have painted it, save Daumier in his pictures of Don Quixote among the barren hills of La Mancha. And if nothing in Granada and the Alhambra can be quite unexpected, it is because one has seen it all beforehand with Irving, from the high Tower of Comares and the windows of the Hall of Ambassadors, or else, following him through the baths and mosque and courts of the silent Palace, crossing the ravine to the cooler gardens of the Generalife, and climbing the Albaycin to the white church upon its summit.

There have been many changes in the Alhambra since Irving's day. The Court of Lions lost in loveliness when the roses with which he saw it filled were uprooted. The desertion he found had more picturesqueness than the present restoration and pretence of orderliness. Irving was struck with the efforts which the then Commander, Don Francisco de Serna, was making to keep the Palace in a state of repair and to arrest its too certain decay. Had the predecessors of De Serna, he thought, discharged the duties of their station with equal fidelity, the Alhambra might have been still almost as the Moor, or at least Spanish royalty had left it. What would he say, one wonders, to the Alhambra under its present management? Frank neglect is often less an evil than sham zeal. The student, watched, badgered, oppressed by red-tapeism, has not gained by official vigilance; nor is the Palace the more secure because responsibility has been transferred from a pleasant gossiping old woman to half a dozen indolent guides. The burnt roof in the ante-chamber to the Hall of Ambassadors shows the carelessness of which the new officers can be guilty; the matches and cigarette ends with which courts and halls are strewn explain that so eloquent a warning has been in vain. And if the restorer has been let loose in the Alhambra, at the Generalife there is an Italian proprietor, eager, it would seem, to initiate the somnolent Spaniard into the brisker ways of Young Italy. Cypresses, old as Zoraïde, have already been cut down ruthlessly along that once unrivalled avenue, and their destruction, one fears, is but the beginning of the end.

But whatever changes the past sixty years have brought about in Granada, the popularity of Irving's book has not weakened with time. Not Ford, nor Murray, nor Hare has been able to replace it. The tourist reads it within the walls it commemorates as conscientiously as the devout read Ruskin in Florence. It serves as text book in the Court of Lions and the Garden of Lindaraxa. It is the student's manual in the high mirador of the Sultanas and the court of the mosque where Fortuny painted. In a Spanish translation it is pressed upon you almost as you cross the threshold. Irving's rooms in the Palace are always locked, that the guide may get an extra fee for opening—as a special favour—an apartment which half the people ask to see. As the steamers "Rip Van Winkle" and "Knickerbocker" ply up and down the Hudson, so the Hotel Washington Irving rises under the shadow of the Alhambra. Even the spirits and spooks that haunt every grove and garden are all of his creation, as Spaniards themselves will be quick to tell you; though who Irving—or, in their familiar speech, "Vashington"—was, but very few of them could explain. And thus his name has become so closely associated with the place that, just as Diedrich