horizon; that horizon is four blocks distant from his own. When he takes his afternoon stroll, instead of going and returning thpough a spacious avenue of poplars as long as the Paseo of Santiago, which expands and animates the mind, he follows an artificial lake of motionless and lifeless water, in the centre of which stands a structure of magnificent proportions, immovable and stationary. The city is a cloister surrounded by ravines; the promenade is a cloister with iron grates; every square of houses has a cloister of nuns or friars; the colleges are cloisters; the jurisprudence taught there, the theology, all the mediseval scholastic learning of the place, is a mental cloister within which the intellect is walled up and fortified against every departure from text and commentary. Cordova knows not that aught besides Cordova exists on earth; it has, indeed, heard that there is such a place as Buenos Ayres, but if it believes this, which it does not always, it asks: "Has it a university? but it must be an affair of yesterday. How many convents has it? Has it such a promenade as this? If not, it amounts to nothing."
"Whose work on jurisprudence do you study?" inquired the grave Doctor Gijena, of a young man from Buenos Ayres.
"Bentham's."
"Whose, sir, do you say? Little Bentham's?"[1] indicating with his finger the size of the duodecimo in which Bentham's work is published. . . . "That wretched little Bentham's! There is more sense in one of my writings than in all those wind-bags. What a university, and what contemptible doctors!"
- ↑ Benthancito, the termination expressing derision.
