"One day my kind friend Colonel S. took me to hear a debate in the
_Senado_, the Spanish Chamber of Peers, which holds its sittings in
the chapel of a suppressed convent, near the palace. By dint of paint,
gilding, and carpets, the room has been divested of its sanctified
aspect, and made to look like a handsome modern room. They have not
thought it necessary that a place in which a hundred gentlemen in
surtouts meet to discuss secular matters in this nineteenth century,
should be made to resemble a chapel of the fifteenth. Antiquity is
here represented in the person of two halberdiers, who stand to guard
the door, dressed in extravagant costume, like beefeaters in full
bloom. Rows of raised seats extend on each side of the room; in
the center, facing the beef-eaters, are the chair and desk of the
president, and on each side a little tribune, from which the clerks
read out documents from time to time. The spectators are accommodated
in niches round the walls. Each member speaks from his place, and the
voting is by ballot. First a footman hands round a tray of beans, and
then each advances, when his name is called, to a table in the center,
where he drops his bean into the box. The beans are then counted, and
the result proclaimed by the president. On the right of the chair, in
the front, is the bench assigned to the ministers; and there I had
the good luck to see Narvaez, otherwise called Duke of Valencia, and
a great many fine names besides, and, in reality, master of all the
Spains. His face wears a fixed expression of inflexible resolve, very
effective, and garnished with a fierce dyed mustache, and a somewhat
palpable wig to match. His style of dress was what, in an inferior
man, one would have called 'dandified.' An unexceptionable surtout,
opened to display a white waistcoat with sundry chains, and the
extremities terminated, respectively, in patent leather and primrose
kid. During the discussion he alternately fondled a neat riding-whip
and aired a snowy pocket-handkerchief. Those who know him give him
credit for good intentions and great courage, but do not expect
that he will ever set the Thames on fire, whatever he may do to
the Manzanares. He is a mixture, they say, of the chivalric and the
asinine: a kind of moral mule. His personal weakness is a wish to be
thought young, and hence he was naturally angry when Lord Palmerston
wanted to give him a 'wrinkle.' I saw, likewise, Mon, the Minister of
Finance, smiling complacently, like a shopkeeper on his customers;
and the venerable Castanos, Duke of Bailen, who, as he tottered in,
stooping under the weight of ninety years, was affectionately greeted
by Narvaez and others. On the whole, the debate seemed to be languid,
and to be listened to with little interest; but that is the general
fate of debates in July."
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