I do not know what the occupations and
amusements of that life are, but I will suppose them unworthy enough.
There must be a certain space of neutral life uniting or dividing the
two, which would form a curious inquiry, but Avould probably not lend
itself to literary study. Besides this middle ground there is another
neutral territory at Gibraltar which we traversed after luncheon, in
order to say that we had been in Spain. That was the country of many
more youthful dreamers in my time than, I fancy, it is in this. We used
then, much more than now, to read Washington Irving, his _Tales of the
Alhambra,_ and his history of _The Conquest of Granada,_ and we read
Prescott's histories of Spanish kings and adventures in the old world
and the new. We read _Don Quixote,_ which very few read now, and we read
_Gil Blas,_ which fewer still now read; and all these constituted Spain
a realm of faery, where every sort of delightful things did or could
happen. I for my part had always expected to go to Spain and live among
the people I had known in those charming books, yet I had been often in
Europe, and had spent whole years there without ever going near Spain.
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