Excerpt from Letters Concerning the Spanish Nation: Written at Madrid During the Years 1760 and 1761 The writer, apprehending that his flay in spain would have been of much longer duration, had formed his original plan of a much larger extent, than that which is now laid before the pu blic but as the war, which unfortunately broke out between the two courts, prevented his profecuting that more extenfive defign, the reader will, he hopes, charitably place this defect to the ac count of that unforefeen event, and not to any want of intention or induftry in the writer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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In 1797 Robert Southey published a richly detailed account of his journey in Spain and Portugal between December 1795 and May 1796, from his arrival in Coruna in the northwest of the Spanish coast to the heart of Castile and into Madrid, before making his way to Lisbon. Structured as a series of letters written as he travelled across the Iberian Peninsula, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal engages with the tradition of English travelogues, while borrowing traits from other genres such as the journal, translation, literary criticism, history, and the picturesque guidebook. On his way, Southey comments on every aspect of Spanish and Portuguese society, from local food and wine, bizarre customs, literature and theatregoing, to Iberian politics and religion. In his letters Southey, who would grow to become one of the leading Hispanists in late Georgian England, contrasts the political, religious, cultural and social systems of Britain and two of the oldest nations in the European continent in a way that raises important questions about cultural contact and transmission during the Romantic period. This edition critically reassesses Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal by looking at Southey’s deeply ambiguous cultural cosmopolitanism and his life-long investment in all things Spanish and Portuguese.