Castilian Days | Page 8

of its people. There is but one portion of the city which appeals to the
tourist's ordinary set of emotions. This is the old Moors' quarter,--the
intricate jumble of streets and places on the western edge of the town,
overlooking the bankrupt river. Here is St. Andrew's, the parish church
where Isabella the Catholic and her pious husband used to offer their
stiff and dutiful prayers. Behind it a market-place of the most primitive
kind runs precipitately down to the Street of. Segovia, at such an angle
that you wonder the turnips and carrots can ever be brought to keep
their places on the rocky slope. If you will wander through the dark
alleys and hilly streets of this quarter when twilight is softening the tall
tenement-houses to a softer purpose, and the doorways are all full of
gossiping groups, and here and there in the little courts you can hear the
tinkling of a guitar and the drone of ballads, and see the idlers lounging
by the fountains, and everywhere against the purple sky the crosses of
old convents, while the evening air is musical with slow chimes from
the full-arched belfries, it will not be hard to imagine you are in the
Spain you have read and dreamed of. And, climbing out of this
labyrinth of slums, you pass under the gloomy gates that lead to the
Plaza Mayor. This once magnificent square is now as squalid and
forsaken as the Place Royale of Paris, though it dates from a period
comparatively recent. The mind so instinctively revolts at the
contemplation of those orgies of priestly brutality which have made the
very name of this place redolent with a fragrance of scorched Christians,
that we naturally assign it an immemorial antiquity. But a glance at the
booby face of Philip III. on his round-bellied charger in the centre of
the square will remind us that this place was built at the same time the

Mayflower's passengers were laying the massive foundations of the
great Republic. The Autos-da-Fe, the plays of Lope de Vega, and the
bull-fights went on for many years with impartial frequency under the
approving eyes of royalty, which occupied a convenient balcony in the
Panaderia, that overdressed building with the two extinguisher towers.
Down to a period disgracefully near us, those balconies were occupied
by the dull-eyed, pendulous-lipped tyrants who have sat on the throne
of St. Ferdinand, while there in the spacious court below the varied
sports went on,--to-day a comedy of Master Lope, to-morrow the gentle
and joyous slaying of bulls, and the next day, with greater pomp and
ceremony, with banners hung from the windows, and my lord the king
surrounded by his women and his courtiers in their bravest gear, and
the august presence of the chief priests and their idol in the form of
wine and wafers,--the judg-ment and fiery sentence of the thinking men
of Spain.
Let us remember as we leave this accursed spot that the old palace of
the Inquisition is now the Ministry of Justice, where a liberal statesman
has just drawn up the bill of civil marriage; and that in the convent of
the Trinitarians a Spanish Rationalist, the Minister of Fomento, is
laboring to secularize education in the Peninsula. There is much coiling
and hissing, but the fangs of the ser-pent are much less prompt and
effective than of old.
The wide Calle Mayor brings you in a moment out of these mouldy
shadows and into the broad light of nowadays which shines in the
Puerta del Sol. Here, under the walls of the Ministry of the Interior, the
quick, restless heart of Madrid beats with the new life it has lately
earned. The flags of the pavement have been often stained with blood,
but of blood shed in combat, in the assertion of individual freedom.
Although the government holds that fortress-palace with a grasp of iron,
it can exercise no control over the free speech that asserts itself on the
very sidewalk of the Principal. At every step you see news-stands filled
with the sharp critical journalism of Spain,--often ignorant and unjust,
but generally courteous in expression and independent in thought.
Every day at noon the northern mails bring hither the word of all
Europe to the awaking Spanish mind, and within that massive building
the converging lines of the telegraph are whispering every hour their
persuasive lessons of the world's essential unity.

The movement of life and growth is bearing the population gradually
away from that dark mediaeval Madrid of the Catholic kings through
the Puerta del Sol to the airy heights beyond, and the new, fresh quarter
built by the philosopher Bourbon Charles III. is becoming the most
important part of the city. I think we may be permitted to hope that the