The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9 | Page 7

which the Gazpacho is
made up:--
MADRID.
"I left, I suppose, scarcely a street in Madrid which I did not traverse,
or a church which I did not enter. The result is hardly worth the trouble.
One street and church are exactly like another street and church. In the
latter, one always finds the same profusion of wooden Christs, and
Madonnas in real petticoats, on the walls, and the same scanty
sprinkling of worshipers, also in petticoats, on the floor. The images
outnumber the devotees here, as in all other Roman Catholic countries
(except Ireland, which is an exception to every rule.) To a stranger, the
markets are always the most interesting haunts. A Spaniard, he or she,
talks more while making the daily bargain than in all the rest of the
twenty-four hours. The fruit and vegetable market was my especial
lounge. There is such a fresh, sweet smell of the country, and the
groups throw themselves, or are thrown, into such pretty tableaux after
the Rubens and Snyders fashion. The shambles one avoids instinctively,
and fish-market there is none, for Madrid is fifty hours' journey from
the nearest sea, and the Manzanares has every requisite for a fine trout
stream, but water.
"Madrid has one peculiarity which conduces very much to the visitor's
comfort, namely, that there are very few inevitable 'sights' to be gone
through. The armory said to be the finest in the world; the palace, ditto
(which people who are addicted to upholstering may go and see, if they
don't mind breaking the tenth commandment); the museum of natural
history, where is the largest loadstone in active operation between this
and Medina; and the Academia, nearly complete the list. Everybody
should devote a morning to the last-named, were it only for the sake of
the Murillos. The famous picture of 'St. Isabel giving alms to the sick'
has been arrested at Madrid on its return from Paris to Seville. As the

Sevilians have instituted a 'process' for its recovery, it is likely to stay
there for some time longer. 'The Patrician's Dream' is quite cheering to
look upon, so rich and glowing it is. Shut your eyes to the
semi-ludicrous effect of husband, wife, and dog, in a decreasing series,
like the three genders in Lindley Murray, all asleep.
"The gardens of the queen, sunk in a deep hollow below the palace,
deserve a visit. The head-gardener, of course a Frenchman, struggles
gallantly against all kinds of difficulties of soil, climate, and lack of
water. By a series of ingenious artifices he has concocted a plot of grass,
some ten feet square, to the great astonishment of all natives."
NARVAEZ IN THE SENATE.
"One day my kind friend Colonel S. took me to hear a debate in the
_Senado_, the Spanish Chamber of Peers, which holds its sittings in the
chapel of a suppressed convent, near the palace. By dint of paint,
gilding, and carpets, the room has been divested of its sanctified aspect,
and made to look like a handsome modern room. They have not
thought it necessary that a place in which a hundred gentlemen in
surtouts meet to discuss secular matters in this nineteenth century,
should be made to resemble a chapel of the fifteenth. Antiquity is here
represented in the person of two halberdiers, who stand to guard the
door, dressed in extravagant costume, like beefeaters in full bloom.
Rows of raised seats extend on each side of the room; in the center,
facing the beef-eaters, are the chair and desk of the president, and on
each side a little tribune, from which the clerks read out documents
from time to time. The spectators are accommodated in niches round
the walls. Each member speaks from his place, and the voting is by
ballot. First a footman hands round a tray of beans, and then each
advances, when his name is called, to a table in the center, where he
drops his bean into the box. The beans are then counted, and the result
proclaimed by the president. On the right of the chair, in the front, is
the bench assigned to the ministers; and there I had the good luck to see
Narvaez, otherwise called Duke of Valencia, and a great many fine
names besides, and, in reality, master of all the Spains. His face wears a
fixed expression of inflexible resolve, very effective, and garnished
with a fierce dyed mustache, and a somewhat palpable wig to match.
His style of dress was what, in an inferior man, one would have called
'dandified.' An unexceptionable surtout, opened to display a white

waistcoat with sundry chains, and the extremities terminated,
respectively, in patent leather and primrose kid. During the discussion
he alternately fondled a neat riding-whip and aired a snowy
pocket-handkerchief. Those who know