“Thrice sounds the clarion; lo! the signal falls, The den expands, and Expectation mute Gapes round the silent circle’s peopled walls. Bounds with one lashing spring the mighty brute, And, wildly staring, spurns, with sounding foot, The sand, nor blindly rushes on his foe; Here, there, he points his threatening front, to suit His first attack, wide waving to and fro His angry tail; red rolls his eye’s dilated glow.
Foil’d, bleeding, breathless, furious to the last, Full in the centre stands the bull at bay-- ’Mid wounds, and clinging darts, and lances brast, And foes disabled in the brutal fray: Shake the red cloak, and poise the ready brand; Once more through all he bursts his thundering way-- Vain rage! the mantle quits the conynge hand, Wraps his fierce eye--’tis past--he sinks upon the sand!”
Every literary man who has visited Madrid, from the Chevalier de Bourgoanne to Mr Arthur Symons, has given us his impressions of the sport of bull-fighting. De Bourgoanne, in his “Travels in Spain” (1789), writes of the severity with which the spectators at the Madrid bull-fights criticised any deficiencies on the part of the _toreros_. Speaking of the final act of the _corrida_, the Chevalier states that, “if the animal immediately falls, the triumph of the conqueror is celebrated by a thousand acclamations; but if the blow be not decisive, if the bull survives and again strives to brave the fatal knife, the murmurs are not less numerous. The _espada_, whose address was about to be extolled to the skies, is considered only as a clumsy butcher. He instantly endeavours to recover from his disgrace, and disarm the severity of his judges.”
De Bourgoanne found the Madrileños divided in their admiration for the two celebrated _espadas_ of that day. One coterie swore by Costillares; another avowed that Romero was the better exponent of the art of tauromachy. This extravagant enthusiasm of the Madrid populace, aroused by the bull-fight, greatly bewildered the French traveller; but he admits that, in spite of the indifference evinced by the spectators at the _corrida_, the Spaniard is not lacking in compassion nor “devoid of every amiable and delicate emotion.” He relates that the government was alive to “the moral and political inconvenience of that kind of frenzy,” and the economists declared that the destruction of so many robust bulls was prejudicial to agriculture. “The reigning monarch,” writes the Chevalier, “who endeavours to polish the manners of his nation and to turn its attention towards more useful objects, wishes to destroy in it an inclination in which he perceives nothing but inconvenience; but he is too wise to employ violent means.”