This interesting book recounts the journey of an American writer and diplomat through Castile during the years 1868-1870, a period between Isabel II's ousting and Amadeo's coronation. It is a memoir offering personal insights into the author's experiences and observations during this time.

"The papers composing this volume were written in Madrid in the spring of last year. [1870?] Since then, a series of important modifications have taken place in the politics of Spain, through the accession of King Amadeus, and the death of Marshal Prim."--Introduction

The Spanish Craze is the compelling story of the centuries-long U.S. fascination with the history, literature, art, culture, and architecture of Spain. Richard L. Kagan offers a stunningly revisionist understanding of the origins of hispanidad in America, tracing its origins from the early republic to the New Deal. As Spanish power and influence waned in the Atlantic World by the eighteenth century, her rivals created the "Black Legend," which promoted an image of Spain as a dead and lost civilization rife with innate cruelty and cultural and religious backwardness. The Black Legend and its ambivalences influenced Americans throughout the nineteenth century, reaching a high pitch in the Spanish-American War of 1898. However, the Black Legend retreated soon thereafter, and Spanish culture and heritage became attractive to Americans for its perceived authenticity and antimodernism. Although the Spanish craze infected regions where the Spanish New World presence was most felt--California, the American Southwest, Texas, and Florida--there were also early, quite serious flare-ups of the craze in Chicago, New York, and New England. Kagan revisits early interest in Hispanism among elites such as the Boston book dealer Obadiah Rich, a specialist in the early history of the Americas, and the writers Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also considers later enthusiasts such as Angeleno Charles Lummis and the many writers, artists, and architects of the modern Spanish Colonial Revival in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spain's political and cultural elites understood that the promotion of Spanish culture in the United States and the Western Hemisphere in general would help overcome imperial defeats while uniting Spaniards and those of Spanish descent into a singular raza whose shared characteristics and interests transcended national boundaries. With elegant prose and verve, The Spanish Craze spans centuries and provides a captivating glimpse into distinct facets of Hispanism in monuments, buildings, and private homes; the visual, performing, and cinematic arts; and the literature, travel journals, and letters of its enthusiasts in the United States.

From the Golden Age to Goya. This is the first study wholly devoted to reception of Spanish art in Britain and Ireland. Examining the extent and sources of knowledge of Spanish art in the British Isles during an age of increasing contact, particularly in theaftermath of the Peninsular War, it contains contributions by leading scholars, including reprints of three essays by Enriqueta Harris Frankfort, to whose memory this book is dedicated. Focusing on Spanish art from the Golden Age to Goya, these studies chart the growth in understanding and appreciation of the Spanish School, and its punctuation by controversies and continuing distrust of religious images in Protestant Britain, as well as by the successive `discoveries' of individual artists - Murillo, Velázquez, Ribera, Zurbarán, El Greco and Goya. The book publishes important new research on art importation, collecting and dealing, and discusses the increase in access to andscholarship on works of art, including their reproduction through both traditional prints and copies and the newly invented photographic methods. It also considers for the first time the role of women in reflecting taste for thearts of Spain. It is richly illustrated with 17 colour and 54 black and white illustrations. NIGEL GLENDINNING is Emeritus Professor of Spanish and Fellow of Queen Mary University of London. HILARY MACARTNEY isHonorary Research Fellow of the Institute for Art History, University of Glasgow. Contributors: NIGEL GLENDINNING, HILARY MACARTNEY, JEREMY ROE, SARAH SYMMONS, MARJORIE TRUSTED, ENRIQUETA HARRIS FRANKFORT

The present English version, authorized by the publishers and heirs of M. Merimee, is based on the third French Edition. New material of two sorts has been added, however. First, the translator has been allowed to utlize an annotated, interleaved copy of the Precis, 1922, in which the author, and after his death his son Henri, himself a distinguished Hispanist, had set down material for the next revision. This accounts for many inserted names and phrases, and some paragraphs. Second, the translator has rewritten and added with some freedom.