Читать книгу International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science - Volume 1, No. 9, August 26, 1850 - Various - Страница 6

Gazpacho; or, Summer Months in Spain, is the title of a new book by W. George Clark, published in London. Gazpacho, it seems, is the name of a dish peculiar to Spain, but of universal use there, a sort of cold soup, made up of familiars and handy things, as bread, pot-herbs, oil, and water. "My Gazpacho," says the author, "has been prepared after a similar receipt. I know not how it will please the more refined and fastidious palates to which it will be submitted; indeed, amid the multitude of dainties wherewith the table is loaded, it may well remain untasted." It at least deserves a better fate than that. The volume relates, in a pleasant, intelligent, and gossiping way, a summer's ramble through Spain, describing with considerable force the peculiarities of its people, and the romantic features by which it is marked. The clever painter could not have better materials. The party-colored costumes of the peasants, like dahlias at a Chiswick show; the somber garments of the priests, the fine old churches, the queer rambling houses, looking centuries old, the dull, gloomy streets of Madrid, the life and activity of the market-place. Such are the objects upon which the eye rests, and of which Mr. Clark was too observant to neglect any. The following passages will give an idea of the materials of 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 him give him credit for good intentions and great courage, but do not expect that he will ever set the Thames on fire, whatever he may do to the Manzanares. He is a mixture, they say, of the chivalric and the asinine: a kind of moral mule. His personal weakness is a wish to be thought young, and hence he was naturally angry when Lord Palmerston wanted to give him a 'wrinkle.' I saw, likewise, Mon, the Minister of Finance, smiling complacently, like a shopkeeper on his customers; and the venerable Castanos, Duke of Bailen, who, as he tottered in, stooping under the weight of ninety years, was affectionately greeted by Narvaez and others. On the whole, the debate seemed to be languid, and to be listened to with little interest; but that is the general fate of debates in July."