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Updated: June 19, 2025
The grandest hours of a gambling saloon are not the opening ones. If Spain has bull-fights, and Rome once had her gladiators, Paris waxes proud of her Palais-Royal, where the inevitable roulettes cause blood to flow in streams, and the public can have the pleasure of watching without fear of their feet slipping in it. Take a quiet peep at the arena. How bare it looks!
The Duke of Hamilton, through his horse-racing proclivities, in three years got through his entire fortune of £70,000, and I will say that some of you are being undermined by it. With the bull-fights of Spain and the bear-baitings of the pit may the Lord God annihilate the infamous and accursed horse-racing of England and America.
I, as a mere spectator, looked on with admiration at this combat at those evolutions, flights, and pursuits, executed with such order and courage, and with a precision that was truly extraordinary. I had often witnessed bull-fights, and often had I shuddered at seeing the toreadors adopt a similar method in order to turn the furious animal from the pursuit of the picador.
At Monterey they were more magnificently feted; at the Presidio, at the Mission, on board Spanish, Mexican, and Russian ships lying in harbor, balls, dances, bull-fights, dinners, all that the country knew of festivity, was lavished on the beautiful and winning young bride.
She had done all she could to keep the men from going to bull-fights on the Sabbath, and had offered to read the morning service, if the men would attend; and now she was going to celebrate Christmas, though she realty did believe that the people who never saw snow forgot that Christ was ever born! Yet was he not born in a country very strongly resembling this very one which ignored him?
But his colour is often hot and muddy, and perhaps he will go down to that doubtful quantity, posterity, as an etcher and designer of genius. After leaving the Prado you remember only the Caprices, the Bull-fights, and the Disaster of War plates; perhaps the Duchess of Alba, undressed, and in her dainty toreador costume.
Scenes of cruelty and blood constitute the favorite amusement of the Spaniards, their greatest delight being in bull-fights. An eye-witness describes the manner in which they conduct themselves during these appalling scenes in the following language. "The intense interest which they feel in this game is visible throughout, and often loudly expressed.
Until we do learn to show this respect before Europeans we must still resign ourselves to the imputation, if they wish to make it, of crudeness, of being still sadly in want of refining. The mere name of Spain calls up at once a string of flashing, barbaric pictures Moorish magnificence and Christian chivalry, bull-fights, boleros, serenades, tattered pride and cruel pleasure.
There were bull-fights in the Plaza this very one for five days, and to each of his tenants-in-chief, De La Cuesta gave a horse, a barrel of tallow, an ounce of silver, and half an ounce of gold dust. Ah, those were days. That was a gay life. This" he made a comprehensive gesture with his left hand "this is stupid."
Gay caballeros are wending to the bear-baiting, the bull-fights, the "baile," and the rural feasts. Splendid riders prance along, artfully forcing their wild steeds into bounds and curvets with the rowels of their huge silver-mounted spurs. Dark lissome girls raise their velvety eyes and applaud this daring horsemanship. Senioritas Luisa, Isabel, and Panchita lose no point of the display.
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