¹ Nichols, Thomas L., Forty Years of American Life (London, 1846), I, 343 Google Scholar.

² Conversely, in at least one instance, the scholarly Hispanic works, in this case Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru, inspired travel writing, or so Warren, T. Robinson confessed in Dust and Foam; or Three Oceans and Two Continents (New York, 1859), pp. 92–93 Google Scholar: “On the eve of manhood, when the imagination was the most powerful, when the mind was craving excitement, and when the soul was all susceptibility, daguerreotyping each hour new and opposite impressions; at that period of my life my eye chanced to light upon a History of the Conquest of Peru: … so enraptured did I become with everything connected with this romantic country, that I resolved before I died, if I could possibly effect it, to visit Peru.”

³ Irving, Pierre M., Life and Letters of Washington Irving, IV, 312, cited by Brooks, Van Wyck, The World of Washington Irving (New York, 1944), p. 321 Google Scholar.

⁴ Prescott, William H., History of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston, 1855), I, 7, nGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Flint, Timothy, Francis Berrian, or The Mexican Patriot (Boston, 1826), I, 19 Google Scholar.

⁶ Digges, Thomas Atwood, Adventures of Alonzo: Containing some Striking Anecdotes of the Prime Minister of Portugal, ed. Rev. McMahon, Thomas J. (New York, 1943), p. xvi Google Scholar.

⁷ Hassal, Mary, Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, in a Series of Letters Written by a Lady at Cape François, to Colonel Burr, Late Vice-President of the United States (Philadelphia, 1808)Google Scholar.

⁸ The sources for James Fenimore Cooper’s Mercedes of Castile (1840) have been discussed by Goodfellow, Donald M., “The Sources of Mercedes of Castile,” American Literature, XII (1940)Google Scholar, 318–328; the source for Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1856) by Scudder, H. H., “Melville’s Benito Cereno and Captain Delano’s Voyages,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, XLIII (1928), 502–532 Google Scholar; and for The Encantadas; or Enchanted Isles (1856) by Thomas, Russell, “Melville’s Use of Some Sources in The Encantadas,” American Literature, III (1931–1932), 432–456 Google Scholar.

⁹ For an account of Spanish books in early North American libraries, see Harry Bernstein, “Las primeras Relaciones intelectuales entre New England y el mundo Hispánico,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, V (January, 1939), 1–17.

¹⁰ For a discussion of American travelers in Spain, both male and female, and of their grievances and complaints concerning accommodations, see Farnham, Carrie Evangeline, American Travellers in Spain, The Spanish Inns, 1776–1867 (New York, 1921)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Life and Letters of Qeorge Ticknor (Boston, 1876), I, 188.

¹² Wallis, Severn Teackle, Glimpses of Spain; or, Notes of an Unfinished Tour in 1847 (New York, 1849), p. 365 Google Scholar.

Of French travelers, he wrote: “France has, as yet, sent no De Tocquevilles into Spain. The better class of her travelers have generally carried with them that systematic devotion to their own ‘idées’ and national ‘prescriptions,’ which so frequently interferes with a Frenchman’s judgment, and nowhere so decidedly as in the Peninsula; for France and Spain, like

‘Oil and water, woman and a secret,

Are hostile properties.’

Joined with this usual disqualification, there is also the notion so prevalent in France, that the Peninsula is but an appandage [sic] of her, and should be judged and dealt with on that theory. Of the less graceful and philosophical French travelers, the great majority have their ideas of the Spaniards chiefly from the Barber of Seville. They find you, everywhere, ‘des Figaro, des Almavivá,’ and seem to think that they are wandering among the heroes of an opera or melo-drama, who disappoint them, hugely, when they fall below the Paris standard of stage-scenery and decorations. In cookery, too, the Gaul holds his neighbors to be merely savages. He could endure them as cut-throats and banditti, but they villainously feed on garlic and garbanzos, the moral obliquity of which he can not tolerate. With feelings and ideas such as these, of course, he travels pleasantly and usefully. The Spaniards call him a ‘gavacho,’ and he writes that they are ‘des barbares!’” (pp. 362–363).

Wallis’s opinion of British travelers in Spain was even more acidic: “The English traveler, though less abstract and artificial, and more practically sensible than his mercurial rival, is more impregnable, if possible, in his personal prejudices and social and individual habits, than the Frenchman in his theories and fanatical generalizations. He has, in a ten-fold proportion, what might be called the traveling-carriage-propensity—a sort of congenital affinity with the snail, in that turn of mind which suggests to him the necessity of carrying his own home, bodily, with him, wherever he goes. Educated and clever as he may be, his prejudices are a portion of his mind and education. Protestantism is the part of his moral wardrobe which he especially furbishes and puts on, for a jaunt to Catholic countries. To Spain, in particular, he carries a few of the notions and impressions which have come down from the days of the invincible Armada; not diminished, perhaps by the view he has had, in his childhood, of the captured instruments of torture still on exhibition at the Tower. Comfort, of all the Dei minorum gentium, is the deity whose image he specially packs up among his valuables, when he goes to see a people, whom climate and circumstances have taught to despise it. To Spain, he carries the persuasion also, that he ought to be regarded by the natives as one of their national patrons and benefactors, for his services and those of his compatriots, during the war of the Peninsula; forgetting that England selected Spain as a battleground, for her own salvation, not that of the Spaniards, and that she has endeavored, as far as she has been able, to make Spain pay the piper. More than that, too, he forgets that the last way in the world to excite the gratitude of a proud and sensitive people, is to throw their obligations always in their teeth, and to demand as tribute, what is contemptible, unless it spring from a spontaneous sentiment. That a traveler, in such a frame of mind, is hardly a fair or candid judge of what he sees, it needs no ghost to tell. That he is not likely to elicit from the people whom he visits, a display of their most excellent or pleasant qualities, seems just as obvious, on a very rational theory of human nature.” (pp. 363–364).

¹³ Wendell, Barrett, A Literary History of America (New York, 1901), pp. 177–178 Google Scholar.

¹⁴ The Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York, 1944), p. 560.