406 PRÆTERITA-II

without any power of appeal either to the domestic simplicity or personal pride of the ordinary English mind. In artistic power and feeling he had much in common with Paul Veronese: but Paolo had the existing pomp and the fading religion of Venice to give his work hold on the national heart, and epic unity in its design; while poor Lewis did but render more vividly, with all his industry, the toy contrabandista or matador of my mother’s chimneypiece.¹

He never dined with us as our other painter friends did; but his pictures, as long as he worked in Spain, were an extremely important element in both my father’s life and mine.

177. I have not yet enough explained the real importance of my father’s house, in its command of that Andalusian wine district. Modern maps of Spain, covered with tracks of railroad, show no more the courses either of Guadalquivir or Guadiana; the names of railway stations overwhelm those of the old cities; and every atlas differs from every other in its placing of the masses of the Sierras,-if even the existence of the mountain ranges be acknowledged at all.

But if the reader will take ten minutes of pains, and another ten of time, to extricate, with even the rudest sketch, the facts of value from the chaos of things inscrutably useless, in any fairly trustworthy map of Spain, he will perceive that between the Sierra Morena on the north, and Sierra Nevada on the south, the Guadalquivir flows for two hundred miles through a valley fifty miles wide, in the exact midst of which sits Cordova, and half way between Cordova and the sea, Seville; and on the Royal Harbour, Puerto Real, at the sea shore,-Cadiz; ten miles above which, towards Seville, he will find the “Xeres de la Frontera,” to which, as a golden centre of Bacchic commerce, all the vineyards of that great valley of Andalusia,

¹ [See above, p. 348.]

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