rhythm,—a dance of fiends, which Paris has invented to express in license what she lacks in liberty."
This diluted European, rather than Spanish, spirit may be seen in most of the amusements of the politer world of Madrid. They have classical concerts in the circuses and popular music in the open air. The theatres play translations of French plays, which are pretty good when they are in prose, and pretty dismal when they are turned into verse, as is more frequent, for the Spanish mind delights in the jingle of rhyme. The fine old Spanish drama is vanishing day by day. The masterpieces of Lope and Calderon, which inspired all subsequent playwriting in Europe, have sunk almost utterly into oblivion. The stage is flooded with the washings of the Boulevards. Bad as the translations are, the imitations are worse. The original plays produced by the geniuses of the Spanish Academy, for which they are crowned and sonneted and pensioned, are of the kind upon which we are told that gods and men and columns look austerely.
This infection of foreign manners has completely gained and now controls what is called the best society of Madrid. A soirée in this circle is like an evening in the corresponding grade of position in Paris or Petersburg or New York in all external characteristics. The toilets are by Worth; the beauties are coiffed by the deft fingers of Parisian
