THE Reverend Dr. Fernando Castillo, an esteemed Spanish author and teacher, remarks, in his luminous Life of St. Domenick, that Spain has been so bountifully provided by heaven with fine climate, soil, and extra number of saints, that his countrymen are prone to be idle and to neglect such rare advantages. Certainly they may not dig and delve so deeply as is done in lands less favoured, but the reproach of omitting to call on Hercules to do their work, or of not making the most of Santiago in any bodily dilemma, is a somewhat too severe reproach: nowhere in case of sickness have the saving virtues of relics, and the adjurations of holy monks, been more implicitly relied on.

As our learned readers well know, the medical practice of the ancients was, as that of the Orientals still is, more peculiar than scientific. When disease was thought to be a divine punishment for sin, it was held to be wicked to resist by calling in human aid: thus Asa was blamed, and thus Moslems and Spaniards resign themselves to their fate, distrusting, and very properly, their medical men: “Am I a god, to kill or make alive?” In the large towns, in these days of progress, some patients may “suffer a recovery” according to European practice; but in the country and remote villages,—and we speak from repeated personal experience,—the good old reliance on relics and charms is far from exploded; and however Dr. Sangrado and Philip III., whose decrees on medical matters yet adorn the Spanish statutes at large, deplore the introduction of perplexing chemistry, mineral therapeuticals still remain a considerable dead letter, as the church has transferred the efficacy of faith from spiritual to temporal concerns, and gun-shot wounds. Even Ponz, the Lysons of Spain, and before the Inquisition was abolished, ventured to express surprise at the number of images ascribed to St. Luke, who, says he, was not a sculptor, but a physician, whence possibly their sanative influence. The old Iberians were great herbalist doctors; thus those who had a certain plant in their houses, were protected, as a blessed palm branch now wards off lightning. They had also a drink made of a hundred herbs, and hence called centum herbÆ, a bebida de cien herbas, which, like Morison’s vegetable pills, cured every possible disease, and was so palatable that it was drunk at banquets, which modern physic is not; moreover, according to Pliny, they cured the gout with flour, and relieved elongated uvulas by hanging purslain round the patient’s throat. So now the curas y curanderos, country curates and quacks, furnish charms and incantations, just as Ulysses stopped his bleeding by cantation: a medal of Santiago cures the ague, a handkerchief of the Virgin the ophthalmia, a bone of San Magin answers all the purposes of mercury, a scrap of San Frutos supplied at Segovia the loss of common sense; the Virgin of OÑa destroyed worms in royal Infantes, and her sash at Tortosa delivers royal Infantas. Every Murcian peasant believes that no disease can affect him or his cattle, if he touches them with the cross of Caravaca, which angels brought from heaven and placed on a red cow. When we were last at Manresa, the worthy man who showed the cave in which Loyola the founder of the Jesuits did penance for a year, increased an honest livelihood by the sale of its pulverized stones, that were swallowed by the faithful in cases in which an English doctor would prescribe Dover’s or James’s powders. Every province, not to say parish, has its own tutelar saint and relic, which are much honoured and resorted to in their local jurisdiction, and very little thought of out of it, their power to cure having been apparently granted to them by Santiago, as a commission to commit is by Queen Victoria to a magistrate, whose authority does not extend beyond the county bounds. Zaragoza was admirably provided: a portion of the liver of Santa Engracia was anciently resorted to, in cases where blue pill would be beneficial; the oil of her lamps, which never smoked the ceilings, cured lamparones, or tumours in the neck, while that which burnt before the Virgen del Pilar, or the image of the Virgin which came down from heaven on a pillar, restored lost legs; Cardinal de Retz mentions in his Memoirs having seen a man whose wooden substitutes became needless when the originals grew again on being rubbed with it; and this portent was long celebrated by the Dean and Chapter, as well it deserved, by an especial holiday, for Macassar oil cannot do much more. This graven image is at this moment the object of popular adoration, and disputes even with the worship of tobacco and money: countless are the mendicants, the halt, blind, and the lame, who cluster around her shrine, as the equally afflicted ancients, with whom physicians were in vain, did around that of Minerva; and it must be confessed that the cures worked are almost incredible.

It may be said that all this is a raking up of remnants of mediÆval superstition and darkness, and it is probable that the medical men in Madrid and the larger towns, and especially those who have studied at Paris, do not place implicit confidence in these spiritual, nor indeed in any other purely Spanish remedies; but their tried medicinal properties are set forth at length in scores of Spanish county and other histories which we have the felicity to possess, all of which have passed the scrutinizing ordeal of clerical censors, and have been approved of as containing nothing contrary to the creed of the Church of Rome or good customs; nor can it be permitted that a church which professes to be always one, the same, and the only true one, should at its own convenience “turn its back on itself,” and deny its own drugs and doctrines. Nothing is set down here which was not perfectly notorious under the reign of Ferdinand VII.; and whatever the doctors of physic or theology may now disbelieve in Spain, more reliance is still placed, in the rural districts, where foreign civilization has not penetrated, on miracles than on medicines.

We have often and often seen little children in the streets dressed like Franciscan monks—Cupids in cowls—whose pious parents had vowed to clothe them in the robes of this order, provided its sainted founder preserved their darlings during measles or dentition. Nothing was more common than that women, nay, ladies in good society, should appear for a year in a particular religious dress, called el habito, or with some religious badge on their sleeves in token of similar deliverance.

One instance in our time amused all the tertulias of Seville, who maliciously attributed the sudden relief which a fair high-born unmarried invalid experienced from an apparent dropsical complaint to causes not altogether supernatural; Pues, Don Ricardo, “and so, Master Richard,” would her friends of the same age and rank often say, “you are a stranger; go and ask dearest Esperanza why she wears the Virgin of Carmel; come back and let us know her story, and we will tell you the real truth.” Vaya! vaya! Don Ricardo, usted es muy majadero,—“Go to, Master Richard, your Grace is an immense bore,” replied the penitent, if she suspected the authors and motive of the embassy.

The pious in antiquity raised temples to Minerva medica or Esculapius, as Spaniards do altars to Na. SeÑora de los Remedios, our Lady of the Remedies, and to San Roque, whose intervention renders “sound as a roach,” a proverb devised in his honour by our ancestors, who, before the Reformation, trusted likewise to him; and both thought, if Cicero is to be credited, that these tutelars did at least as much as the doctor. Alas! for the patient credulity of mankind, which still gulps down such medicinal quackery as all this, and which long will continue to do so even were one of the dead to rise from the grave, to deprecate the absurd treatment by which he and so many have been sacrificed.

However, by way of compensation, the saving the soul has been made just as primary a consideration in Spain as the curing the body has been in England. These relics, charms, and amulets represent our patent medicines; and the wonder is how any one in Great Britain can be condemned to death in this world, or how any one in the Peninsula can be doomed to perdition in the next: possibly the panaceas are in neither case quite specific. Be that as it may, how numerous and well-appointed are the churches and convents there, compared to the hospitals; how amply provided the relic-magazine with bones and spells, when compared to the anatomical museums and chemists’ shops; again, what a flock of holy practitioners come forth after a Spaniard has been stabbed, starved, or executed, not one of whom would have stirred a step to save an army of his countrymen when alive; and what coppers are now collected to pay masses to get his soul out of purgatory!

Beware, nevertheless, gentle Protestant reader, of dying in Spain, except in Cadiz or Malaga, where, if you are curious in Christian burial, there is snug lying for heretics; and for your life avoid being even sick at Madrid, since if once handed over to the faculty make thy last testament forthwith, as, if the judgment passed on their own doctors by Spaniards be true, Esculapius cannot save thee from the crows: avoid the Spanish doctors therefore like mad dogs, and throw their physic after them.

The masses and many in Spain have their own tutelars and refuges for the destitute; the kings and queens—whom God preserve!—have their own especial patroness by prerogative, in the image of the Virgin of Atocha at Madrid, which they and the rest of the royal family visit every Sunday in the year when in royal health. No sooner was the sovereign taken dangerously ill, and the court physicians at a loss what to do, as sometimes is the case even in Madrid, than the image used to be brought to his bedside; witness the case of Philip III., thus described by Bassompierre in his dispatch:—“Les mÉdecins en dÉsespÈrent depuis ce matin que l’on a commencÉ À user des remÈdes spirituels, et faire transporter au palais l’image de N. D. de Athoche.” The patient died three days after the image was sent for.

Although neither priest nor physician might credit the sanative properties of rags and relics, they gladly called them in, for if the case then went wrong, how could mortal man be expected to succeed when the supernatural remedy had failed? All inquests in awkward cases are hushed up by ascribing the death to the visitation of God. Again, if a relic does not always cure it rarely kills, as calomel has been known to do. This interruptive principle, one distinct from human remedies, is admitted by the church in the prayers for sick persons; and where faith is sincere, even relics must offer a powerful moral medical cordial, by acting on the imagination, and giving confidence to the patient. This chance is denied to the poor Protestant, nay, even to a newly-converted tractarian, for truly, to believe in the efficacy of a monkish bone, the lesson must have been learnt in the nursery. Their substitute in Lutheran lands, in partibus infidelium, is found in laudanum, news, and gossip; the latter being the grand specific by which Sir Henry kept scores of dowagers alive, to the despair of jointure-paying sons, from marquises down to baronets; and how much real comfort is conveyed by the gentle whisper, “Your ladyship cannot conceive what an interest his or her Royal Highness the —— takes in your ladyship’s convalescence!” The form of the moral restorative will vary according to climate, creeds, manners, &c.; it is to the substance alone that the philosophical physician will look. That chord must be touched, be it what it may, to which the pulse of the patient will respond; nor, provided he is recovered, do the means much signify.

One word only on Spanish midwifery. There is a dislike to male accoucheurs, and the midwife, or comadre, generally brings the Spaniard into the world by the efforts of nature and the aid of manteca de puerco, or hogs’ lard, a launching appropriate enough to a babe, who, if it survives to years of discretion, will assuredly love bacon. The newly-born is then wrapped up, like an Egyptian mummy, and is carefully protected from fresh air, soap, and water; an amulet is then hung round its neck to disarm the evil eye, or some badge of the Virgin is to ensure good luck: thus the young idea is taught from the cradle, what errors are to be avoided and what safeguards are to be clung to, lessons which are seldom forgotten in after-life. Without entering further into baby details, the scanty population of the Peninsula may in some measure be thus accounted for. Parturition also is frequently fatal; in ordinary cases the midwife does very well, but when a difficulty arises she loses her head and patient. It is in these trying moments, as in the critical operations of the kitchen, that a male artiste is preferable.

The Queens and Infantas of Spain have additional advantages. The palladium of the city of Tortosa is the cinta[11] or girdle, which the Virgin, accompanied by St. Peter and St. Paul, brought herself from heaven to a priest of the cathedral in 1178; an event in honour of which a mass is still said every second Sunday in October. The gracious gift was declared authentic in 1617, by Paul V., and to justify his infallibility it works every sort of miracle, especially in obstetric cases; it is also brought out to defend the town on all occasions of public calamity, but failed in the case of Suchet’s attack. This girdle, more wonderful than the cestus of Venus, was conveyed in 1822, by Ferdinand VII.’s command, in solemn procession to Aranjuez, in order to facilitate the accouchement of the two Infantas, and as Lucina when duly invoked favoured women in travail, so their Royal Highnesses were happily delivered, and one of the babes then born, is the husband of Isabel II. For humbler Castilian women, when pregnant, a spiritual remedy was provided by the canons of Toledo, who took the liveliest interest in many of the cases. The grand entrance to the cathedral had thirteen steps, and all females who ascended and descended them ensured an early and easy time of it. No wonder therefore, when these steps were reduced to the number of seven, that the greatest possible opposition should have been made by the fair sex, married and unmarried. All these things of Spain are rather Oriental; and to this day the Barbary Moors have a cannon at Tangiers by which a Christian ship was sunk, and across this their women sit to obtain an easy delivery. In all ages and countries where the science of midwifery has made small progress, it is natural that some spiritual assistance should be contrived for perils of such inevitable recurrence as childbirth. The panacea in Italy was the girdle of St. Margaret, which became the type of this Cinta of Tortosa, and it was resorted to by the monks in all cases of difficult parturition. It was supposed to benefit the sex, because when the devil wished to eat up St. Margaret, the Virgin bound him with her sash, and he became tame as a lamb. This sash brought forth sashes also, and in the 17th century had multiplied so exceedingly, that a traveller affirmed “if all were joined together, they would reach all down Cheapside;” but the natural history of relics is too well known to be enlarged upon.

Any account of Spanish doctors without a death, would be dull as a blank day with fox-hounds, although the medical man, differing from the sportsman, dislikes being in at it. He, the moment the fatal sisters three are running into their game, slips out, and leaves the last act to the clergyman: hence the Spanish saying, “When the priest begins, the physician ends.” It is related in the history of Don Quixote, that no sooner did the barber feel the poor knight’s wrist, than he advised him to attend to his soul and send for his confessor; and now, when a Castilian hidalgo takes to his bed, his friends pursue much the same course, nor does the catastrophe often differ. Lord Bacon, great in wise saws and instances, prayed that his death might come from Spain, because then it would be long on the journey; but he was not aware that the gentlemen in black formed an exception to the proverbial procrastination and dilatoriness of their fellow countrymen. As patients are soon dispatched, the law[12] of the land subjects every physician to a fine of ten thousand maravedis, who fails after his first visit to prescribe confession; the chief object in sickness being, as the preamble states, to cure the soul; and so it is in Italy, where Gregory XVI. issued in 1845 three decrees; one to forbid railroads, another to prohibit scientific meetings, and a third to order all medical men to cease to attend invalids who had not sent for the priest and communicated after the third visit. In Spain, the first question asked in our time of the sick man was, not whether he truly repented of his sins, but whether he had got the Bull; and if the reply was in the negative, or his old nurse had omitted to send out and buy one, the last sacraments were denied to the dying wretch.

One Word on this wonderful Bull, that disarms death of its sting, and which, although few of our readers may ever have heard of it, plays a far more important part in the Peninsula than the quadruped does in the arena. Fastings are nowhere more strictly enjoined than here, where Lent represents the Ramadan of the Moslem. The denials have been mitigated to those faithful who have good appetites, by the paternal indulgence of their holy father at Rome, who, in consideration that it was necessary to keep the Spanish crusaders in fighting condition in order more effectually to crush the infidel, conceded to Saint Ferdinand the permission that his army might eat meat rations during Lent, provided there were any, for, to the credit of Spanish commissariats in general, few troops fast more regularly and religiously. The auspicious day on which the arrival is proclaimed of this welcome bull that announces dinner, is celebrated by bells merry as at a marriage feast; in the provincial cities mayors and corporations go to cathedral in what is called state, to the wonder of the mob and amusement of their betters at the resurrection of quiz coaches, the robes, maces, and obsolete trappings, by which these shadows of a former power and dignity hope to mark individual and collective insignificancy. A copy of this precious Bull cannot of course be had for nothing, and as it must be paid for, and in ready money, it forms one of the certain branches of public income. Although the proceeds ought to be expended on crusading purposes, Ferdinand VII., the Catholic King, and the only sovereign in possession of such a revenue, never contributed one mite towards the Christian Greeks in their recent struggle against the Turkish unbelievers.

These bulls, or rather paper-money notes, are prepared with the greatest precautions, and constituted one of the most profitable articles of Spanish manufacture; a maritime war with England was dreaded, not so much from regard to the fasting transatlantic souls, as from the fear of losing, as Dr. Robertson has shown, the sundry millions of dollars and silver dross remitted from America in exchange for these spiritual treasures. They were printed at Seville, at the Dominican convent, the Porta coeli; but Soult, who now it appears is turning devotee, burnt down this gate of heaven, with its passports, and the presses. The bulls are only good for the year during which they are issued; after twelve months they become stale and unprofitable. There is then, says Blanco White, and truly, for we have often seen it, “a prodigious hurry to obtain new ones by all those who wish well to their souls, and do not overlook the ease and comfort of their stomachs.” A fresh one must be annually taken out, like a game-certificate, before Spaniards venture to sport with flesh or fowl, and they have reason to be thankful that it does not cost three pounds odd: for the sum of dos reales, or less than sixpence, man, woman, and child may obtain the benefit of clergy and cookery; but evil betides the uncertificated poacher, treadmills for life are a farce, perdition catches his soul. His certificate is demanded by the keeper of conscience when he is caught in the trap of sickness, and if without one, his conviction is certain; he cannot plead ignorance of the law, for a postscript and condition is affixed to all notices of jubilees, indulgences, and other purgatorial benefits, which are fixed on the church doors; and the language is as courteous and peremptory as in our popular assessed tax-paper—“Se ha de tener la bula:” you must have the bull; if you expect to derive any relief from these relaxations in purgatory, which all Spaniards most particularly do: hence the common phrase used by any one, when committing some little peccadillo in other matters, tengo mi bula para todo—I have got my bull, my licence to do any thing. The possession of this document acts on all fleshly comforts like soda on indigestion, indeed it neutralizes everything except heresy. As it is cheap, a Protestant resident, albeit he may not quite believe in its saving effects, will do well to purchase one for the sake of the peace of mind of his weaker brethren, for in this religion of forms and outer observances, more horror is felt by rigid Spaniards, at seeing an Englishman eating meat during a fast, than if he had broken all the ten commandments. The sums levied from the nation for these bulls is very large, although they are diminished before finally paid into the exchequer; some of the honey gathered by so many bees will stick to their wings, and the place of chief commissioner of the Bula is a better thing than that in the Excise or Customs of unbelieving countries.

To return to the dying man: if he has the bull, the host is brought to him with great pomp; the procession is attended by crowds who bear crosses, lighted candles, bells and incense; and as the chamber is thrown open to the public, the ceremony is accompanied by multitudes of idlers. The spectacle is always imposing, as it must be, considering that the incarnate Deity is believed to be present. It is particularly striking on Easter Sunday, when the host is taken to all the sick who have been unable to communicate in the parish church. Then the priest walks either under a gorgeous canopy, or is mounted in the finest carriage in the town; and while all as he passes kneel to the wafer which he bears, he chuckles internally at his own reality of power over his prostrate subjects; the line of streets are gaily decorated as for the triumphal procession of a king: the windows are hung with velvets and tapestries, and the balconies filled with the fair sex arrayed in their best, who shower sweet flowers down on the procession just at the moment of its passage, and sweeter smiles during all the rest of the morning on their lovers below, whose more than divided adoration is engrossed by female divinities.

To die without confession and communication is to a Spaniard the most poignant of calamities, as he cannot be saved while he is taught that there is in these acts a preserving virtue of their own, independent of any exertions on his part. The host is given when human hopes are at an end, and the heat, noise, confusion, and excitement, seldom fail to kill the already exhausted patient. Then when life’s idle business at a gasp is o’er, the body is laid out in a capilla ardiente, or an apartment prepared as a chapel, by taking out the furniture; where the family is rich, a room on the ground floor is selected, in which a regular altar is dressed up, and rows of large candles lighted placed around the body; the public is then allowed to enter, even in the case of the sovereign: thus we beheld Ferdinand VII. laid out dead and full dressed with his hat on his head, and his stick in his hand. This public exhibition is a sort of coroner’s inquest; formerly, as we have often seen, the body was clad in a monk’s dress, with the feet naked and the hands clasped over the breast; the sepulchral shadow then thrown over the dead and placid features by the cowl, seldom failed to raise a solemn undefinable feeling in the hearts of spectators, speaking, as it did, a language to the living which could not be misunderstood.

The woollen dresses of the mendicant orders were by far the most popular, from the idea that, when old, they had become too saturated with the odour of sanctity for the vile nostrils of the evil one; and as a tattered dress often brought more than half-a-dozen new ones, the sale of these old clothes was a benefit alike to the pious vendor and purchaser; those of St. Francis were preferred, because at his triennial visits to purgatory, he knows his own, and takes them back with him to heaven; hence Milton peopled his shadowy limbo with wolves in sheep’s clothing:—

Women in our time were often laid out in nuns’ dresses, wearing also the scapulary of the Virgin of Carmel, which she gave to Simon Stock, with the assurance that none who died with it on, should ever suffer eternal torments. The general adoption of these grave fashions induced an accurate foreigner to remark, that no one ever died in Spain except nuns and monks. In this hot country, burial goes hand in hand with death, and it is absolutely necessary from the rapidity with which putrefaction comes on. The last offices are performed in somewhat an indecent manner: formerly the interment took place in churches, or in the yards near them, a custom which from hygeian reasons is now prohibited. Public cemeteries, which give at least 4 per cent. interest, have been erected outside the towns, in which long lines of catacombs gape greedily for those occupants who can pay for them, while a wide ditch is opened every day for those who cannot. In this campo santo, or holy field, death levels all ranks, which seems hard on those great families who have built and endowed chapels to secure a burial among their ancestors. They however raised no objections to the change of law, nor have ever much troubled themselves about the dilapidated sepulchres and crumbling effigies of their “grandsires cut in alabaster;” the real opposition arose from the priests, who lost their fees, and thereupon assured their flocks, that a future resurrection was anything but certain to bodies committed into such new-fangled depositories.

Be that as it may, the corpse in its slight coffin is carried out, followed by the male relations, and is then put into its niche without further form or prayer. Ladies who die soon after marriage, and before the bridal hours have danced their measure, are sometimes buried in their wedding dresses, and covered with flowers, the dying injunctions of Shakspere’s Queen Catherine:—

At such funerals the coffin is opened in the catacomb, to gratify the indecent curiosity of the crowd; the dress is next day discussed all over the town, and the entierro or funeral is pronounced to be muy lucido or very brilliant; but life in Spain is a jest, and these things show it. The place assigned for children who die under seven years of age lies apart from that of the adults; their early death is held in Spain to be rather a matter of congratulation than of grief, since those whom the gods love die young; their epitaphs tell a mixed tale of joy and sorrow. El parvulo fue arrebatado Á la gloria, the little one was snatched up into Paradise:—

Yet nature will not be put aside, and many a mother have we seen, loitering alone near the graves, adorning them with roses and plucking up weeds which have no business to grow there; the little corpses are carried to the tomb by little children of the same age, clad in white, and are strewed with flowers short-lived as themselves, sweets to the sweet. The parents return home yearning after the lost child—its cradle is empty, its piteous moan is heard no more, its playthings remain where it left them, and recall the cruel gap which grief cannot fill up, although it

The bodies of the lower orders, dressed in their ordinary attire, are borne to their long home by four men, as is described by Martial; “no useless coffins enclose their breasts,” they are carried forth as was the widow’s son at Nain. And often have we seen the frightful death-tray standing upright at the doors of the humble dead, with a human outline marked on the wood by the death-damp of a hundred previous burdens. Such bodies are cast into the trench like those of dogs, and often naked, as the survivors or sextons strip them even of their rags. Those poorer still, who cannot afford to pay the trifling fee, sometimes during the night, suspend the bodies of their children in baskets, near the cemetery porch. We once beheld a cloaked Spaniard pacing mournfully in the burial-ground of Seville, who, when the public trench was opened, drew from beneath the folds the body of his dead child, cast it in and disappeared. Thus half the world lives without knowing how the other half dies.

In the upper ranks the etiquette of the funeral commences after the reality is over. The first necessary step is within three days to pay a visit of condolence to the family; this is called para dar el pesame. The relations are all assembled in the best room, and seated on chairs placed at the head, the women at one end and the men at another. When a condoling lady and gentleman enter, she proceeds to shake hands with all the other ladies one after another, and then seats herself in the next vacant chair; the gentleman bows to each of the men as he passes, who rise and return it, a grave dumb-show of profound affliction being kept up by all. On reaching the chief mourners, they are addressed by each condoler with this phrase, “AcompaÑo Á usted en su sentimiento;” “I share in the affliction of your grace;” the company meanwhile remain silent as an assemblage of undertakers. After sitting among them the proper time, each retires with much the same form.

In a few days afterwards a printed letter is sent round in the name of all the surviving relations to announce the death to the friends of the family, and to beg the favour of attendance at the funeral service: these invitations are all headed with a cross (+), which is called El Cristus. Before the invasion of the enemy, who not only destroyed the walls of convents, but sapped religious belief also, very many books were printed, and private letters written, with this sign prefixed. In our time sundry medical men at Seville always headed with it their prescriptions, the Cardinal Archbishop having granted a certain number of years’ release from purgatory to all who sanctified with this mark their recipes even of senna and rhubarb. Under this cross, in the invitation, are placed the letters R. I. P. A., which signify “Requiescat in pace. Amen.” At the appointed hour the mourners meet in the casa mortuaria, or the house of death, and proceed together to church. All are dressed in full black, and before the progress of paletots and civilization, wore no cloaks: this, as it rendered each man of them more uncomfortable than St. Bartholomew was without his skin, was considered an offering of genuine grief to the manes of the deceased. Uncloaking in Spain is, be it remembered, a mark of respect, and is equivalent to our taking off the hat. When the company arrives at church, they are received by the ministers, and the ceremony is very solemnly performed before a catafalque covered with a pall, which is placed before the altar, and is brilliantly lighted up with wax candles. As soon as the service is concluded, all advance and bow to the chief mourners, who are seated apart, and thus the tragedy concludes. Parents do not put on mourning for their children, which is a remnant of the patriarchal and Roman superiority of the head of the family, for whom, however, when dead, all the other members pay the most observant respect. The forms and number of days of mourning are most nicely laid down, and are most rigidly observed, even by distant relations, who refrain from all kinds of amusements:—

We well remember the death of a kind and venerable Marquesa at Seville just before the carnival, whose chief grief at dying, was the thought of the number of young ladies who would thus be deprived of their balls and masquerades; many, anxious and obliging, were the inquiries sent after her health, and more even were the daily prayers offered up to the Virgin, for the prolongation of her precious existence, could it be only for a few weeks.

November drear, brings in other solemnities connected with the dead, and in harmony with the fall of the sear and yellow leaves, to which Homer compares the races of mortal men. The night before the first of November—our All Hallow-e’en—is kept in Spain as a vigil or wake; it is the fated hour of love divinations and mysteries; then anxious maidens used to sit at their balconies to see the image of their destined husbands pass or not pass by. November the first is dedicated to the sainted dead, and November the second to all souls: it is termed in Spanish el dia de los difuntos, the day of the dead, and is most scrupulously observed by all who have lost during the past year some friend, some relation—how few have not! The dawn is ushered in by mournful bells, which recall the memory of those who cannot come back at the summons; the cemeteries are then visited; at Seville, long processions of sable-clad females, bearing chased lamps on staves, walk slowly round and round, chaunting melancholy dirges, returning when it gets dusk in a long line of glittering lights. The graves during the day are visited by those who take a sad interest in their occupants, and lamps and flower garlands are suspended as memorials of affection, and holy water is sprinkled, every drop of which puts out some of the fires of purgatory. These picturesque proceedings at once resemble the Eed es Segheer of modern Cairo, the feralia of the Romans, the ?ees?a of the Greeks: here are the flower offerings of Electra, the funes assensi, the funeral torches of pagan mourners, which have vainly been prohibited to Christian Spaniards by their early Council of Illiberis. In Navarre, and in the north-west of Spain, bread and wheat offerings called robos are made, which are the doles or gifts offered for the souls’ rest of the deceased by the pious of ancient Rome.

As on this day the cemetery becomes the public attraction, it too often looks rather a joyous fashionable promenade, than a sad and religious performance. The levity of mere strangers and the mob, contrasts strangely with the sorrow of real mourners. But life in this world presses on death, and the gay treads on the heels of pathos; the spot is crowded with mendicants, who appeal to the order of the day, and importune every tender recollection, by begging for the sake of the lamented dead. Outside the dreary walls all is vitality and mirth; a noisy sale goes on of cakes, nuts, and sweetmeats, a crash of horses and carriages, a din and flow of bad language from those who look after them, which must vex the repose of the benditas animas, or the blessed souls in purgatory, for whom otherwise all classes of Spaniards manifest the fondest affection and interest.

Such is the manner in which the body of a most orthodox Catholic Castilian is committed to the earth; his soul, if it goes to purgatory, is considered and called blessed by anticipation, as the admittance into Paradise is certain, at the expiration of the term of penal transportation, that is, “when the foul crimes done in the days of nature are burnt and purged away,” as the ghost in Hamlet says, who had not forgotten his Virgil. If the scholar objects to a Spanish clergyman, that the whole thing is Pagan, he will be told that he may go farther and fare worse. In the case of a true Roman Catholic, this term of hard labour may be much shortened, since that can be done by masses, any number of which will be said, if first paid for. The vicar of St. Peter holds the keys, which always unlock the gate to those who offer the golden gift by which Charon was bribed by Æneas; thus, to a judicious rich man, nothing, supposing that he believes the Pope versus the Bible, is so easy as to get at once into Heaven; nor are the poor quite neglected, as any one may learn who will read the extraordinary number of days’ redemption which may be obtained at every altar in Spain by the performance of the most trumpery routine. The only wonder is how any one of the faithful should ever fail to secure his delivery from this spiritual Botany Bay without going there at all, or, at least, only for the form’s sake. It was calculated by an accurate and laborious German, that an active man, by spending three shillings in coach-hire, might obtain in an hour, by visiting different privileged altars during the Holy week, 29,639 years, nine months, thirteen days, three minutes and a half diminution of purgatorial punishment. This merciful reprieve was offered by Spanish priests in South America, on a grander style, on one commensurate with that colossal continent; for a single mass at the San Francisco in Mexico, the Pope and prelates granted 32,310 years, ten days, and six hours indulgence. As a means of raising money, says our Mexican authority, “I would not give this simple institution of masses for the benefit of souls, for the power of taxation possessed by any government; since no tax-gatherer is required; the payments are enforced by the best feelings, for who would not pay to get a parent’s or friend’s soul from the fire?” Purgatory has thus been a Golconda mine of gold to his Holiness, as even the poorest have a chance, since charitable persons can deliver blank souls by taking out a habeas animam writ, that is, by paying the priest for a mass. The especial days are marked in the almanac, and known to every waiter at the inn; moreover, notice is put on the church door, Hoy se saca anima, “this day you can get out a soul.” They are generally left in their warm quarters in winter, and taken out in the spring.

Alas for poor Protestants, who, by non-payment of St. Peter’s pence, have added an additional act of heresy, and the worst of all, the one which Rome never pardons. These defaulters can only hope to be saved by faith, and its fruits, good works; they must repent, must quit their long-cherished sins, and lead a new life; for them there is no rope of St. Francis to pull them out, if once in the pit; no rosary of St. Domenick to remove them, quick, presto, begone, from torment to happiness. Outside the pale of the Vatican, their souls have no chance, and inside the frontiers of Spain their bodies have scarcely a better prospect, should they die in that orthodox land. There the greatest liberal barely tolerates any burial at all of their black-blooded heretical carcasses, as no corn will grow near them. Until within a very few years at seaport towns, their bodies used to be put in a hole in the sands, and beyond low water mark; nay, even this concession to the infidel offended the semi-Moro fishermen, who true believers and persecutors feared that their soles might be poisoned: not that either sailor or priest ever exhibited any fear of taking British current coin, all cash that comes into their nets being most Catholic, so says the proverb, El dinero es muy Catolico.

Matters connected with the grave have been placed, as regards Protestants, on a much more pleasant footing within these last few years; and it may be a consolation to invalids, who are sent to Spain for change of climate, and who are particular, to know, in case of accidents, that Protestant burial-grounds are now permitted at Cadiz, Malaga, and in a few other places. The history of the permission is curious, and has never, to the best of our belief, been told. In the days of Philip II. Lutherans were counted in many degrees worse than dogs; when caught alive, they were burnt by the holy tribunal; and when dead, were cast out on the dunghill. Even when our poltroon James I. sent, in 1622, his ill-judged olive-bearing mission, by which Spain was saved from utter humiliation, Mr. Hole, the secretary of the ambassador, Lord Digby, having died at Santander, the body was not allowed to be buried at all; it was put into a shell, and sunk in the sea; but no sooner was his lordship gone, than “the fishermen,” we quote from Somers’ tracts, “fearing that they should catch no fish as long as the coffin of a heretic lay in their waters,” fished it up, “and the corpse of our countryman and brother was thrown above ground, to be devoured by the fowls of the air.” In the treaty of 1630, the 31st Article provided for the disposal of the goods of those Englishmen who might die in Spain, but not for their bodies. “These,” says a commentator of Rymer, “must be left stinking above ground, to the end that the dogs may be sure to find them.” When Mr. Washington, page to Charles I., died at Madrid, at the time his master was there, Howell, who was present, relates that it was only as an especial favour to the suitor of the Spanish Infanta that the body was allowed to be interred in the garden of the embassy, under a fig-tree. A few years afterwards, 1650, Ascham, the envoy of Cromwell, was assassinated, and his corpse put, without any rites, into a hole; but the Protector was not a man to be trifled with, and knew well how to deal with a Spanish government, always a craven and bully, from whom nothing ever is to be obtained by concession and gentleness, which is considered as weakness, while everything is to be extorted from its fears. He that very year commanded a treaty to be prepared for the proper burial of his subjects, to which the blustering Spaniard immediately assented. This provision was stipulated into the treaty of Charles II. in 1664, and was conceded and ratified again in 1667 to Sir Richard Fanshawe.

No step, however, appears to have been taken before 1796, when Lord Bute purchased a spot of ground for the burial of Englishmen outside the AlcalÁ-gate, at Madrid. During the war, when all Spain was a churchyard to our countrymen, this bit of land was taken possession of by a worthy Madrilenian, not for his place of sepulture, but for good and profitable cultivation. In 1831 Mr. Addington caused some researches to be made, and the original conveyance was found in the Contaduria de Hypothecas, the registry of deeds and mortgages which backward Spain possesses, and which advanced England does not. The intruder was ejected after some struggling on his part. Before Lord Bute’s time the English had been buried at night and without ceremonies, in the garden of the convent de los Recoletos; and, as Lord Bute’s new bit of ground was extensive and valuable, the pious monks wished to give up the English corner in their garden, in exchange for it; but the transfer was prevented by the recent law which forbade all burial in cities. The field purchased by Lord Bute is now unenclosed and uncultivated; fortunately it has not been much wanted, only fifteen Protestants having died at Madrid during the last thirty years. In November, 1831, Ferdinand VII. finally settled this grave question by a decree, in which he granted permission for the erection of a Protestant burial-ground in all towns where a British consul or agent should reside, subject to most degrading conditions. The first cemetery set apart in Spain, in virtue of this gracious decree from a man replaced on his throne by the death of 30,000 Englishmen, was the work of Mr. Mark, our consul at Malaga; he enclosed a spot of ground to the east of that city, and placed a tablet over the entrance, recording the royal permission, and above that a cross. Thus he appealed to the dominant feelings of Spaniards, to their loyalty and religion. The Malagenians were amazed when they beheld this emblem of Christianity raised over the last home of Lutheran dogs, and exclaimed, “So even these Jews make use of the cross!” The term Jew, it must be remembered, is the acme of Spanish loathing and vituperation. The first body interred in it was that of Mr. Boyd, who was shot by the bloody Moreno, with the poor dupe Torrijos and the rest of his rebel companions.