Writing the Rock of Gibraltar

Byron described it as the dirtiest and most detestable spot in existence'; Coleridge complained that the onset of the Levanter Cloud made him ill with a sense of suffocation' that caused his tongue to go furry white and his pulse quick and low'; the Scottish writer John Galt thought that the same was oppressive to the functions of life, and to an invalid denying all exercise'; Thackeray was entranced by the mixture of swarthy Moors, dark Spanish smugglers in tufted hats, and fuddled seamen from men-of-war' sauntering through Gibraltar's Main Street; Benjamin Disraeli thought that the Rock was a wonderful place, with a population infinitely diversified'; John Drinkwater complained about the scorpion, centipes and other venomous reptiles which abound among the rocks and the old buildings'; George Whitefield, never a man to mince his words, believed that drunkenness was a sin that easily beset the men of Gibraltar'; Mark Twain rhapsodised about the bare-kneed Highlanders' wandering around the Garrison, as well as the soft-eyed Spanish girls from San Roque, veiled Moorish beauties from Tarifa, and long-robed, bare-legged, ragged Muhammadan vagabonds from Tetuan and Tangier....' These and other comments about Gibraltar are to be found in WRITING THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR, a new volume compiled by M. G. Sanchez.