If
It Have No Character Of Its Own, It Is A Mirror Where All The Faces Of
The Peninsula May Sometimes Be Seen.
It is like the mockingbird of the
West, that has no song of its own, and yet makes the woods ring with
every note it has ever heard.
Though Madrid gives a picture in little of all Spain, it is not all
Spanish. It has a large foreign population. Not only its immediate
neighbors, the French, are here in great numbers, - conquering so far
their repugnance to emigration, and living as gayly as possible in the
midst of traditional hatred, - but there are also many Germans and
English in business here, and a few stray Yankees have pitched their
tents, to reinforce the teeth of the Dons, and to sell them ploughs and
sewing-machines. Its railroads have waked it up to a new life, and the
Revolution has set free the thought of its people to an extent which
would have been hardly credible a few years ago. Its streets swarm with
newsboys and strangers, - the agencies that are to bring its people into
the movement of the age.
It has a superb opera-house, which might as well be in Naples, for all
the national character it has; the court theatre, where not a word of
Cas-tilian is ever heard, nor a strain of Spanish music. Even
cosmopolite Paris has her grand opera sung in French, and easy-going
Vienna insists that Don Juan shall make love in German.
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