George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[205] but this material is either unused or perverted. Talent is certainly not wanting, and instruction to a certain point is very general. Nearly everybody can read and write, and if they can do no more, it is because the monks, who manage all the education of the country, find it for their interest to stop them here. In disposition, and turn of character, they vary in different provinces. In Catalonia they are industrious and active; in Aragon, idle, proud, and faithful; in Castile, cold and rude, but still attaching themselves easily to those who are kind to them; and in Andalusia, light-hearted, giddy, cruel, and revengeful. Galicia furnishes water-carriers to all Madrid, and they have among themselves a tremendous police, which insures the honesty of the individuals, and sometimes even inflicts secretly the punishment of death; but the government tolerates without acknowledging it, because the Gallegos are not unjust, and their opportunities and temptations to dishonesty are so great, that, though you never hear of an instance of it, much is due to their police. They are the hardiest and most enterprising of all the Spaniards, and, at the season of the harvest, may be found all over Castile and Estramadura, and even in Portugal, gathering it for the idle inhabitants; some remain afterwards as servants, and some are to be found in little shops and inns everywhere in Spain; but when they have accumulated a subsistence, they are almost sure to go home to die in peace at last. These different characters are so distinctly marked in the different provinces, that it seems as if you had changed country every time you pass from one to another; but still there are some traits in common to them all. One of the most striking—and one, it seems to me, on which many of their national virtues are founded—is a kind of instinctive uprightness, which prevents them from servility. I have seen the lowest class of the people, such as gardeners, bricklayers, etc., who had never seen the king, perhaps, in their lives, suddenly spoken to by him; but I never saw one of them hesitate or blush, or seem confounded in any way by a sense of the royal superiority. And in a country where the noxious luxury of a great number of servants is so oppressive, it is curious to see with what familiarity they treat their masters; joining in the conversation at the Duchess of Ossuna's, for instance, while they wait at table, correcting the mistakes of their statements, etc., but in all cases and under all circumstances without for an instant offending against the most genuine and unaffected respect. The higher, however, you go up in society in Spain, the less the different classes are like what their situation ought to make them. As the means of respectable instruction fail almost altogether, the